serial consign - design / research

city archive / city engine

smith — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:15:31 -0400

Over the last few days I've discovered a pair of interesting projects that explore urban form through computation. The first is an interactive map of Rome that locates and contextualizes a number of 18th century perspective drawings, the second is a software application that utilizes procedural modeling to generate expansive 3D cities.

Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome is an interactive archive of the work of Giuseppe Vasi (1710-1782). Like Pannini and Piranesi, Vasi is considered one of the great vedutisti (delineators of urban space). His masterwork was Magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna, a 238 image, ten-volume collection of prints that provided comprehensive documentation of the architecture and urban character of Rome. The crux of the Imago Urbis project is that it is takes Vasi's perspectival views and locates them on the Nolli map. The screen capture above illustrates how the vantage point of each perspective is identified and how architectural and infrastructural "points of interest" are annotated and colour-coded so that the user can situate the drawing in relation to the surrounding urban fabric.

The statement for project contextualizes the relationship between Vasi and Giambattista Nolli (the author of the Nolli map) as follows:

Given that Nolli and Vasi were contemporaries and collaborators focusing on the same subject, it seems obvious that their work is intrinsically related; up to now no vehicle existed to effectively synthesize their individual achievements into a single resource that effectively evokes Settecento Rome. We believe that it will be extremely informative to place these 18th century documents into their 21st century context so that spatial relationships can be drawn and new conclusions reached about their continuing significance to the understanding of the city. Our overarching objective is to document and integrate two distinct graphic modes for representing the Eternal City: the pictorial view and the ichnographic plan.

This interactive piece functions as both a map and an archive, a historical document and a database of urban views.

This is the main interface for Imago Urbis, which identifies the location of each of Vasi's drawings. Beyond communicating the inventory of available views, the map resonates with the increasingly familiar process of geo-navigating through a set of images (on everyblock for example). I find Imago Urbis extremely engaging because it applies numerous tropes from contemporary urban informatics to a historical archive, breathing new life into old representations of urban space. In addition to the overall scope of the project, the elegant interface and design are also commendable; how can you not love an "urban viewport" with a taxonomy class for the sites of executions?

Imago Urbis was developed by Jim Tice, Erik Steiner, Allan Ceen, and Dennis Beyer from the Department of Architecture, InfoGraphics Lab and Department of Geography at the University of Oregon. This is the same team that brought us the Interactive Noli Map in 2005. [via the map room]

CityEngine is a new software system developed by Procedural Inc., a Switzerland-based developer with ties to the ETH Zürich technical university. In watching the video above, it is quite clear how this tool could be employed to quickly produce sophisticated models of urban space based off defined parameters, design rules, material palettes, etc. The application seems equally capable of generating meandering street geometry as it does detailing elevations - one can only imagine how useful a tool like this could be in the film or gaming industries (the software made quite a splash at fmx/08). More abstractly, the software speaks to the emergent nature of urban form and growth, when viewed in fast-forward the process seems even more amazing.

More information on CityEngine can be obtained at the Procedural website as there a number of additional animations available for viewing, Procedural CEO Pascal Müller's site is also worth taking a look at. [via digital urban]

early radar technology

smith — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:40:03 -0400

In the past I've discussed Vannevar Bush’s Memex as a harbinger of networked culture and the desktop metaphor in computing. Earlier this year, I spent some time researching several other technologies from the mid-20th century to consider how they tie in to the history of information visualization. I plan on gradually reworking this material as a series of posts, each focusing on the history and/or aesthetics of a specific technology. This first post is a crash course on the origins of Radio Detection and Ranging (aka radar). Expect future posts on the Head-up Display (HUD), an excavation of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and other related technologies. It is my hope that in examining the history of these tools and processes we may better understand the intersection of 20th century imaging technologies and pervasive interface culture.

[radar display & operator circa 1945]

In tracing the genealogy of information visualization there are a number of potential historical discourses to draw from. The study of information design usually employs statistics, demographics or cartography as choice vantage points from which to consider the discipline. A continued interest in the work of William Playfair (1759-1823) and Charles Minard (1781-1870) is proof positive of the legitimacy of these backstories in the eyes of most design historians.

One of the most famous images associated with Charles Minard is his temporal map (pictured above) which details the ill-fated march of Napoleon into Russia in 1812-1813. It is no accident that one of the first complex information graphics schematized a military campaign, considering the longstanding tradition of technological and informational innovation being spurned by the gears of war. This particular cartographic enterprise has become of of the signature images of information visualization and can often be found within the first several slides of any introductory presentation on the topic. However, instead of submerging into a detailed analysis of the techniques and methodology of Minard in this visualization, a more fruitful discussion would be to instead dwell on the fact that this image was produced to document and represent a military campaign. Given that technological innovation is implicit in warfare, it only follows that the military is a key area of interest to any historical analysis of information visualization.

Of the many battles that took place between the United Kingdom and Germany during WWII, the Battle of the Beams was one of the most decisive. This conflict pitted nascent British and German radar technology against one another with aerial dominance of the skies over England hanging in the balance.

[german knickebein transmitter]

Radar was first developed by the German inventor Christian Huelsmeyer for the purpose of collision avoidance in nautical navigation. Huelsmeyer publicly demonstrated his system in 1904 and it operated by firing radio waves at targets and detecting their reflections. Over the next two decades, European and North American scientists would further develop this research and the range of radar systems extended from several to 25 miles. By the onset of the war, radar was emerging as a viable tactical tool. The crux of British-German radar warfare emerged from the German air force’s utilization of the Knickebein and X-Gerät signal transmission systems to enable nighttime bombing runs over Britain. The Luftwaffe bombing raids were executed with surgical precision and this presented a sea change in aerial warfare to which the British military had to respond. Fortunately for Britain, a rudimentary radar network had been implemented before the onset of the war and it was able to serve as the cornerstone in a comprehensive British defense strategy that would ultimately “out-visualize” their German opponents.

In 1937, a prototype radar network was set up along the perimeters of Great Britain. Dubbed Chain Home, the system consisted of a line of transmitter stations positioned at 50 mile intervals around the perimeter of the United Kingdom. Led by scientist Robert Watson-Watt the British military capitalized on this system to develop state-of-the-art methods for enemy detection and fire control. This advanced mapping of the airspace over the United Kingdom acted as a force-multiplier allowing the British defenses to concentrate the aircraft where they were needed most and coordinate supporting anti-aircraft fire. Chain Home was monitored by oscilloscope display units and the operation of this system is described in wikipedia as follows:

When a pulse was sent out into the broadcast towers, the scope was triggered to start its beam moving horizontally across the screen very rapidly. The output from the receiver was amplified and fed into the vertical axis of the scope, so a return from an aircraft would deflect the beam upward. This formed a spike on the display, and the distance from the left side—measured with a small scale on the bottom of the screen—would give the distance to the target. By rotating the receiver goniometer [a tool for measuring angles] connected to the antennas to make the display disappear, the operator could determine the direction to the target… while the size of the vertical displacement indicated something of the number of aircraft involved. By comparing the strengths returned from the various antennas up the tower, the altitude could be determined.

This imaging technology provided the British forces with an early warning system by generating realtime data tracking German aerial activity over, or approaching, the United Kingdom. These types of radar-based defense networks have been described as “electromagnetic curtains”, an upgrade to the medieval notion of fortification in which brick and mortar are bolstered and extended by telecommunication infrastructure (see Manuel de Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines for an excellent critical reading of the history of the technology).

Parallel to the development of radar, British military engineers also implemented identification, friend or foe (IFF), which utilized an early version of RFID technology to distinguish friendly from "other" aircraft on a radar display. This kind of "tagging" and related RFID technology (along with the ubiquitous database) is now a driving force of contemporary inventory management.

The technological developments outlined above provided Britain with the strategic edge it required to turn the tide in the air war against Germany. Oscilloscope based radar system would eventually give way to the Plan Position Indicator (PPI) display (pictured above in a contemporary meteorological context), which is now universally associated with radar technology.

some poolside reading

smith — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:20:33 -0400

The last week has been quite hectic! I'm in the midst of rebuilding Vague Terrain in Drupal, exploring some exciting new opportunities and knuckling down for an impending crunch at my day job. Despite all this activity, I've been diligently working through some great writing and media. Please note the following:

_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_, a new blogging project by the prolific poet/theorist Mez Breeze. Mez launched Augmentology this past April and she has quickly amassed an (expectedly) idiosyncratic series of posts which explore notions of presence, identity and play across a variety of gaming and social media platforms. Mez is in the midst of expanding the scope of Augmentology by inviting a number of guest contributors to provide content for the project - these will tentatively include: Joseph Delappe, Howard Rheingold, Azdel Slade, Trevor Dodge and Shane Hilton. I've also been invited into the fold, and I am excited at the prospect of further exploring some of the themes I've touched on in my previous posts on gaming.
Last week Mitchell Whitelaw tipped me off about Strange Ontologies in Digital Culture, a paper that he recently co-authored with Troy Innocent and Mark Guglielmetti. The essay explores the implications of social software (facebook, del.icio.us, etc.) and some of the counterintuitive percepts and phenomena made possible by immersion in digital space. I found the discussions on death in gaming and character deletion particularly engaging.
The video archives of the recent Software Studies workshop/symposium at UCSD have been posted. The two dozen or so pecha kucha-style presentations provide an incredible window into the current research projects of numerous top shelf digital theorists and practitioners including Jordan Crandall, Warren Sack, Nick Montfort, and many others. I've only watched a few videos thus far, but I found Ian Bogost's presentation on the forthcoming Platform Studies project quite fascinating.

two videos on social connectivity

smith — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:45:54 -0400

Given the past examination of topics such as large-scale conversations and corporate anthropology here at Serial Consign, I thought I'd share a few videos related to community and the mapping of networks. These two videos serendipitously arrived in my news reader at approximately the same time today and provide an infrastructural and aesthetic window into collaboration, communication and connectivity.

First up is an interview with Anton Kast conducted by Kevin Rose. Anton is the lead scientist behind Digg, the "often imitated and never duplicated" community news portal. In this ten-minute conversation he provides a fascinating window into the logistics of information management at Digg, the site is currently in the process of launching a new recommendation engine in a (needed) effort to provide users with the most relevant content given their past interactions with the service. Kast is quite articulate and it is very interesting to hear his descriptions of the "correlation coefficients" that connect and quantify the interests of various users. In listening to his explanations of this new feature, I couldn't help but smile and think of the several hours I've wasted over the last two years staring blankly at stamen design's brilliant Swarm visualization at digg labs. [via david cohn]

Thankfully, this second video is far removed from the noise of the commercial web world and comes to us by way of the Netherlands-based interactive designer Jori de Goede. As evidenced by the video above (and his Vimeo channel), Goede has a keen interest in the visualization of conversations and speech. This particular video is an elegant representation of the types of social geometries that can emerge from a relatively small group of participants. I'd be curious to see the results if Goede applied this methedology to a larger group of "conversation participants" in the future. [via processing blogs]

the demarcated gallery

smith — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:44:02 -0400

This weekend I've been exploring my archived del.icio.us bookmarks in hopes of inspiring a new research project. In my perusal, I came across Occupation Game, a very clever installation by STEALTH.unlimited, a Rotterdam and Belgrade-based design collective. Part of from_&_to, a 2007 group show, Occupation Game took the exhibition history of the kunst Meran Merano arte gallery space (in Italy) and mapped the entire "spatial history" of the venue as a colourful, composite floor plan. STEALTH.unlimited reviewed a range of video and photographic archival material to determine the various configurations of the gallery over the entire history of the venue. An excerpt from their statement:

The documentation from different mentioned sources has been used to detect positions of artworks in the gallery spaces during its six year existence, and 24 exhibitions. Their outlines are 'drawn' with tape on the floor, each year in a different colour and each exhibition within one year with another line thickness (2002 - white,... 2007 - red, line thicknesses 9 mm to 75 mm). These accumulated ‘shadows’, or horizontally layered projections, map the total ‘history’ of artistic occupation of this space.

Between the flooring and the colourful line-work, Occupation Game almost reads as some kind of demented basketball court, no doubt accompanied by an unintelligible rule book. The piece speaks to the process of mapping, interrogates the architectural plan as a drawing convention and highlights the manner in which we can occupy the same space in different ways.

Occupation Game does not only engage the floor as a surface of demarcation but supplements this graphical information with related annotation on the walls of the gallery. This text provides a legend with which to read the intervention as a comprehensive text which documents the history of the space.

STEALTH.unlimited is comprised of Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen and the duo has been collaborating since 2000. Their portfolio contains a range of provocative work dealing with the representation of space in a variety of different contexts.

spore / tools vs. toys

smith — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:44:24 -0400

I've been anticipating the release of Spore for a long time, partly from the nostalgia of having "grown up" with (in?) SimCity and Will Wright's later work, but mainly because I think the game will be a very convincing thought-experiment in scale, emergence and interface in gaming. I'd like to highlight some comments made by Will Wright in a recent video interview, as I consider this commentary great advice for any designer. When asked about the "intelligence" embedded in the recently released Spore Creature Creator, Wright had the following to say:

Most people when they use 3D editors, they approach it you know, just very mechanically. Here's a tool, here's the ability of the tool, but if you think about a tool as entertainment you go about it in a totally different way than [when considering] a tool as a tool. So that's why we wanted every tool in Spore to be as entertaining as a toy, so they want to be toys first and foremost and by being a great toy, it automatically becomes a great tool.. and then you get a lot of people using it, making lots and lots of stuff.

This notion of "playability" is evident when manipulating the interface of the Creature Creator as the application offers users the ability to engage in sophisticated parametric modeling without it even feeling like work. The above image illustrates an editing function which allows the user to alter the length of their creature via pull-taps located on either end. In activating this operation you are presented with an x-ray view of the underlying skeletal structure of your beast. It is important to note that this information is not so much graphical, rather an actual physiology that determines how the character will walk, run, fight, etc. The Creator Creator is full of interesting 3D modeling widgets for placing, moving and aligning body parts and all of these operations are extremely intuitive. I haven't felt so immediately comfortable operating a 3D application since the first time I used Sketchup and while users are not modeling from scratch in Spore, the diversity of the "anatomy library" coupled with the flexibility of the interface for placing and manipulating these organic building blocks offers an incredible amount of control.

If you're interested in learning more about the Spore Interface I highly recommend spending some time with the demo version of the Creature Creator (available for both Mac and PC at the official site for the game) and if you are feeling a little more hands-off in your curiosity, WIRED posted an overview of the software earlier this month.

Thanks to Jim Rossignol for tipping me off about the Wright video interview via this Rock, Paper, Shotgun post.

alex munt interview

smith — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:08:42 -0400

I first encountered the writing of Alex Munt while doing research for a post on David Lynch last summer. While googling various ephemera related to Lynch's recent work I came across the article Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble?, which stopped me dead in my tracks. This text, which Munt penned for Flow TV, is indicative of his dynamic reading of cinema and related analysis of emerging methods of production and distribution. Alex is a Lecturer in the Media Department at Macquarie University (in Australia) and his focus is on digital low-budget cinema and new directions in screenwriting and feature filmmaking. Alex and I have been emailing back and forth for the last several weeks and the transcript that follows provides a fascinating window into his research.

One of the most recognizable characteristics of your writing about film is that you spend quite a bit of time "off the screen" addressing new means of distribution (i.e. YouTube) and production techniques (i.e. pro-am gear). A binary that turns up in your Feature Film: A ‘You Tube Narrative Model’? article is the divide between 'Elite Digital' and 'Democratic Digital'. Could you discuss the difference between these paradigms and speculate as to what commercial cinema can learn from YouTube?

In terms of staying ‘off the screen’ (at least part of the time) – I think it is important space to occupy, in order to think about ‘the digital’. The digital is a quantity that needs to be situated for each particular medium. For the cinema, there has been two main digital forces – and in opposite directions. That is, the evolution of high-end digital visual effects (as CGI) in Hollywood and the experiments in digital low-budget cinema, since the mid 1990s. (This is not a new idea in itself, one noted by Lev Manovich, who uses the term ‘Digital Realism’ to situate the work of the Dogme95 brethren, and their ‘lo-fi’ approach to digital feature filmmaking). In each case, via altogether different digital production and post-production pathways, we arrive at the long-form narrative feature film. So the digital, for the cinema, is less a revolution, and more of a remediation, or mutation, often subtle – so we need to pay particular attention to what’s going on with the scripts, behind the camera, with the crews and digital kit and then in the edit suite. Hollywood CGI is not a big part of my own research, but there is a lot of interesting work here. Shilo McClean in her book Digital Storytelling argues that digital visual effects (she calls DVFx) far from being extraneous - are actually having a decisive impact on Hollywood narration, scripts, story and style, for CGI Hollywood cinema. And by the same token, for new low-budget cinema – I see the digital as a real catalyst for a reconsideration, and opportunity for innovation, in narrative, film form and aesthetics of the moving image. In this domain, transformations are evident in film-practice: from ‘open’ scriptwriting, to the use of micro-crews and the shift to HD digital cinematography and affordable digital colour-grading, with software like After Effects. I’ve referred to this digital as ‘democratic’ since as film-practice, it is relatively accessible. And what I think is new here, is the evolution of the digital aesthetic for the moving image, at the low-budget end. In the first Dogme wave, the digital aesthetic got harnessed to a polemical, and rather limiting, single aesthetic dictated by the Dogme95 manifesto, and realised as grainy, shaky cinematography cut to abrupt editing patterns, with minor post production treatment. However, in the current wave of micro/low-budget, small-scale digital cinema, since around 2000, ‘the digital’ is given more room to move. For example, iconic directors like Kiarostami and Lynch both rework their distinctive brand of cinema, the Indie movment goes digital – with Mumblecorps in the US or WarpX in the UK, together with the impact of a wider digital culture on cinema - Web 2.0, social-networking and of course the video explosion, synonymous with YouTube. And for me, this is all really exciting stuff.

[jason eisener / hobo with a shotgun (faux grindhouse trailer) / 2007]

Which gets me to the second part of your question – what can commercial cinema learn from YouTube?, which I would re-phrase this ‘what can narrative cinema learn from YouTube?’, since it casts a wider net. For me, there are three main lessons. The first lesson is at the level of film form, or cinematic form, there is an opportunity to (productively) explore the fragmentation of the long-form feature. This could work, for example, as a reconsideration of a modular, or tableaux, approach to the feature film - something explored by Jean-Luc Godard (among others) in the 1960s. And using fragmentation as part of a low-budget filmmaking process. Then, this idea lends itself to questions about the distribution of features. Once you have a feature, accumulated in parts, in a rigorous cinematic experiment, then film collides with an array of new, and presently immature, narrative models such as webisodes and mobisodes, deployed within a clip-based culture. The second lesson is to engage with the YouTube aesthetic. As audiences become more and more conditioned to an uncontrolled aesthetic of the moving image – then film can be remediated in interesting ways. This is evident in the surge of ‘proteur’ productions, where film professionals exploit the amateur process/aesthetic. Be Kind Rewind, Look or Cloverfield are but a few recent examples. The third ‘learning from YouTube’ lesson for the cinema is to rethink the feature film theatrical experience. In particular - how it ties in with the ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins) spawned by Web 2.0. One interesting case here, is the original (double-feature) Grindhouse from Tarantino/Rodriguez. For the SXSW Film Festival, Grindhouse engaged with clip culture/participatory culture by seeking to splice a series of faux-trailers inbetween the two features (essentially YouTube clips sandwiched in a theatrical feature experience). And I think that this kind of thinking (whilst of course, being part-marketing) is also innovative in looking at a crossover between the very big screen and the very small….

[david lynch on the iphone (on the iphone) / via damien mully]

In S, M, L, XL: The Question of Scale in Screen Media, you talk about screen-anxiety, which speaks to the shifting sands of aspect ratios and the multiplicity of screen sizes we engage on a daily basis. In reading this article, I couldn't help but think of David Lynch's recent freak out over the idea of the iphone as a device on which one could view a film. To get even smaller than the 11 x 8 cm size of a youtube screen do you have any thoughts on the screen space of mobile devices as an arena for a personal cinema?

The Lynch clip gained a lot of hits, but I do think that as it was taken out of context (as I understand it was remixed from one of the DVD extras from the Mulholland Drive disc) it is not representative of Lynch’s engagement with the digital. For Inland Empire, Lynch risked it all: no-script, got behind the camera and acted as self-distributor (in the US) – which is pretty bold. Also, in his book Catching the Big Fish – while Lynch does give his reservations about the precession of the tiny screen - he also engages: “But digital is here; the video iPod is here; we’ve just got to get real and roll with the flow”. Here, he makes some strong points – that sound (as the repressed element of the cinema) will challenge image on the small screen. He also raises a concern for the successful creation of screen ‘worlds’ on such a small canvas.

To my mind, the central issue for mobile media, and personal cinema, is the issue of scale – where scale is taken to mean both narrative scale and the size of the moving image/sound design. In think the challenge will be to get both these things right. The 4th screen, of mobile media, needs some time to find its own space, within the constraints - and the webisodes, mobisodes and precession of clip-culture will see to this. I often find the direct comparisons to the big-screen cinema odd - since I really think it will be a question of both/and and not either/or. That is, new mobile media should steal, borrow, remix and remediate the language of cinema: using a range of shot sizes, framings, ideas on screen space, performance and mise-en-scene – but not replicate it. The most interesting work will be the result of media mutations. I am of the opinion that our 100 plus years of cinema (silent audiences in a dark room, watching a projection of light) will not vanish in a hurry. Certainly, celluloid will disappear (from the mainstream) when the theatres go digital. But in terms of narrative, feature-form and cinema-going (as a cultural activity) the big screen will hold its allure. One interesting crossover – is the migration of the extras bundled with a feature film – to the mobile media screens: the interviews, trailers, remixes, social-networking portals etc. This is part of the ‘cinema of complexity’ (Harper) where a plethora of supplementary media are consumed alongside the feature itself and obviously lends itself to clip-culture. In terms of movement between the small to medium (television) screen – I think the Quarterlife webisodes provide a good example. While this 8-minute drama worked on the small screen (on Quarterlife.com and MySpace TV) when transplanted to NBC - it got the worst ratings for the network in 17 years. And this takes producers/distributors for new and old media back to the drawing board and signals that distribution across the screenscape will not be a mere roll-out of content.

To turn back to Lynch, could you expand on your comments about Inland Empire and his engagement with the digital? In your essay Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble? you touch on Lynch's transition from the "picture perfect" cinematography of Mulholland Drive to some of the wonky, overexposed shots in Inland Empire. Could you contextualize a specific shot or sequence from this film that embodies the essence of the "digital" David Lynch?

Inland Empire works as an ‘all at once’ kind of approach by Lynch –its alternative scriptwriting, digital production basis and model of self-distribution (I think this explains the very instability of the film itself). Lynch worked as writer, cinematographer and editor. Saying this, Inland Empire is not an entirely DIY ethos – since it was partly funded by French production company StudioCanal. But in the US, the marketing and distribution has been undertaken by Lynch himself (apparently funded by proceeds from davidlynch.com and sales of his Lynch coffee). Here, Lynch has been visiting individual theatres across the States, introducing himself, then checking his picture/sound on each screen. Given the strength of the Lynch ‘brand’ - I imagine this will be prove a profitable experiment in self-distribution.

In terms of specific shots or sequences – let me answer this in two parts. At the level of the shot: Lynch is always keen to remind us of his start as a painter, and art-school training, prior to his transition to ‘moving paintings’ (his term). Lynch has manipulated the texture, grain, contrast of celluloid in his move from canvas to screen. Think of: the high contrast black and white chiascurro of Eraserhead, or the voluptuous, decadent textures in his subsequent films (those deep, colour saturated, heavy curtains come to mind – which surface in multiple films). But Lynch’s new leap - to the grainy and pixelated images of handheld DV in Inland Empire is a big one. And for consumers of analogue-Lynch, is one that requires some effort, and perhaps patience. The type of shots which I think represents digital-Lynch are the portraits of the characters of Inland Empire captured with a Sony PD150, using a wide-angle lens, up-close to the actors: the lighting is harsh and unforgiving, the background rendered in auto-focus, and the colour palette muted, flat and low-contrast. But the images remain distinctively Lynch – in the extreme camera angles (which come closer to his canvas portraits) and because of the consistency in Lynch’s focus on design/set-construction in the film. This is interesting, since it places Lynch, as artist/auteur, in proximity to other amateur image makers – in that, the limitations of prosumer digital technology ensure a consistent digital image aesthetic: from our digital home photos to the cinema screen. I would love to see Lynch take the next step, towards HD digital video for his next project where I think the capacity of the digital as a painterly medium is enhanced, particularly with DIY colour-grading software. And his comments point towards an evolution of his digital cinema when he states “I’m totally embracing the digital world in sound and picture, and I just can’t believe how much control and how many tools are available to us. It’s really beautiful” (Interview with David Lynch by Michael Joshua Rowin).

But for Inland Empire - I don’t think that it is the images/sounds that are most radical – it is the form of the film itself. This gets me to the second part of your question on the identification of particular sequences in the film. Inland Empire is an unwieldy object, one might say ‘masquerading’ as a feature film. In the past, Lynch has actually worked (however idiosyncratically) within reasonably tight parameters of cinematic scriptwriting and narration (see J.J. Murphy’s reading of Mulholland Drive in his book Me and You and Memento and Fargo as evidence of this). But the Lynchian worlds of Inland Empire are something different – they almost seem assembled at random. In my article in FlowTV, I said that it’s a futile exercise to attempt to represent the narrative structure of the film. The closest thing I end up in providing is the metaphor of the wormhole – to connect the worlds/spaces of the film. In fact, it is precisely the radical film form of Inland Empire that has been confronting for some viewers (that is, not the DIY-digital production aesthetic). For my part, I think it the film is very liberating – since it moves narrative cinema towards a condition where the feature film (form) becomes a kind of ‘container’ for moving image media. And it is precisely the extreme episodic cinematic form of Inland Empire that produces some fantastic sequences: when the whores do the locomotion (embedded above) or the LA street scene set to Beck’s Black Tambourine, to name just two. The idea of the feature film as a narrative container – allows a loose assembly of sequences that mimic other contemporary media: the music video, sitcom (the rabbits) and daytime tv. It also makes for a very entertaining theatrical experience – I saw the film at a midnight session at the Sydney Film Festival where it received an enthusiastic reception.

I also want to quickly discuss the script. It was initially reported that Inland Empire was produced without a script – but in a recent interview with Lynch at ReverseShot.com he provides an account of an alternative scriptwriting process used for the film: “So I would script a scene and then go shoot that scene, then write another scene and go and shoot that scene, not knowing if there was going to be anything more than just that scene, or those scenes’ (Lynch interviewed by Rowin). And this is interesting – since it reveals a logic to the distinct ‘container’ form of Inland Empire, as a collection, or assemblage, of random sequences. It also seems to have currency in a digital culture of competing, colliding and intersecting media forms.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I noticed in your writing about Abbas Kiarostami's Ten you accompanied that text with a diagram (detail above) to aid in mapping out the structure of that narrative. Have you worked with graphics to represent any other film narratives? Is this practice common in film writing? Could point us in the direction of any other work along these lines?

This is a kind of David Bordwell-esque mode of thinking about the cinema – as an anatomical breakdown of film narration and structure. My own interests in new digital cinema fuelled the ‘cinematic diagram’ of Kiarostami’s Ten - as way to understand the film. And in Ten (and with Lynch) two of my instincts have been confirmed – firstly, that digital filmmaking allows a rethinking of narrative and cinematic form and secondly, that scriptwriting remains central to the process – for a digital cinema beyond a simple engagement with the latest, smallest prosumer digital camcorder. At present I am working on another cinematic diagram - of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Masculine Feminine – again, to understand its peculiar form - caught between oppositional documentary and fictional patterns of narration. This is based on a paper given at the Telling Stories conference in the UK in 2007 and suggest that a good idea for new cinema may be to look backwards to (what I term) ‘retro-modular’ narratives of International Art House cinema.

A key interest in graphic representation of cinema is: if you can understand film form by a visual mapping process – then this may also become a generative device for feature film scriptwriting/form. In terms of others doing similar things – there are the narrative diagrams in Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You (mostly for television). Also, I recently came across a site on Cinemetrics (a link from Bordwell’s) which is free software that you can download which allows you to gather data (in real-time) whilst (re)watching a film – it accounts for the number of shots, average shot length etc. Cinemetrics would create a database for a particular film and provide data for and in-depth anlaysis of the film, and more interestingly, may point to new ways to consider film form/narration.

The other influence on my thinking on the cinema comes from the design world. I was fascinated by Rem Koolhaas’ diagrams for the OMA Seattle Central Library project. These revealed a design-by-diagram approach with direct correspondence in built form – the result being an unwieldy architectural object (recently seen as the backdrop in TVC advertising for European car brands). I was also attracted to one of your own recent posts at Serial Consign about Ritwik Dey's Lifemaps. These kind of things already have a big impact on more experimental modes of screen media, such as media arts projects, VJing, database cinema, video installations etc – but I am most interested in how this new info-culture will effect the cinema, within the boundaries of narrative, feature film. For example, the Lifemaps suggest a potential to meld narrative (in this case autobiographical) and cinematic form – as a new, generative approach to screenwriting/screen media. This could also work across the documentary/fiction divide. Also, these diagrams/maps also reveal the precession of a new aesthetic of information. Lev Manovich has his new book on ‘Info-Aesthetics’ in process – which details the cultural impact of generative, parameter-based software: across new media arts, music-video, advertising, design, architecture and the cinema. Manovich provides the term ‘hybrid media’ to reveal how the old media is today remixed/transformed/mutated towards dynamic forms. This points to an exciting future for cross/inter/hybrid modes of cultural production in a digital environment.

[harun farocki / deep play / photo: juan freire]

Your response is making me kick myself (once again) for missing out on an opportunity to see Harun Farocki’s Deep Play earlier this spring. One of the things I find so interesting about media theory right now is that the word “convergence” which was being tossed around so freely within net culture in the late 1990s feels not only plausible, but pervasive. To get hyper-specific in regards to an “info-aestheticized cinema”, can you recommend any specific work or sequences which hint at what might loom on the horizon?

I’ve only seen excerpts of Deep Play on YouTube. In a wider context it is part of the currency of the video medium – not only due to the explosion of online video portals but also in a media arts context. It seems to me that video (in particular the digital moving image) is the medium of the moment. In answer to your question on the info-aesthetic I’m going to limit myself to the object of my own research at present – the feature film – in an age of media convergence. Here, Deep Play resonates with that idea in new digital cinema that there is a spatial reconfiguration underway – an idea from film theorists Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib. This transition represents a shift from a traditional 2D mode of ‘coverage’ of cinematic space to the mapping of 3D cinematic ‘zones’. I have cited the Beastie Boys’ concert film Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! as a good example of cinematic space as ‘zone’. The film is introduced as ‘An Authorized Bootleg’. In one interview Adam Yauch/MCA talks about how the film was inspired by a fan’s mobile phone clip taken from one of their live performances and uploaded to the message board on the band’s official web site. The concert is generated from DIY, amateur recording of the event shot simultaneously by fifty fans. It exploits the low-light, unobtrusive/ lightweight and long-take recording functions of consumer cameras. Similar to the mapping of the stadium by the surveillance cameras in Deep Play – the Beastie Boys exploit Madison Square Garden as a cinematic zone: where the ‘story’ of the live concert unfolds not only on stage – but backstage, in the mosh-pit, the bars and (even) bathrooms of the venue. The shift from filmic planes to filmic zones is also evident in the work of UK director Paul Greengrass in his Bourne films – he exploits handheld, run and gun cinematography and rapid-cutting to effect. In his use of ‘live’ locations Greengrass mode of working also represents the hijack of guerrilla filmmaking aesthetics for big-budget cinema. Cloverfield (produced by J.J. Abrams) is another example – where the handheld mapping of a fictional story space (a post-apocalyptic NYC) drove audiences from the theatre with nauseousness. It is important to note that the spatial configuration is not entirely medium dependent: the Beastie Boys opted for Hi-8 ‘retro’ camcorders; Greengrass uses 35mm; and Cloverfield doubles 35mm production for a handheld digital video cameras built into the story. So – the convergence here is one between the broader digital culture (not just the digital medium) and new approaches to filmmaking and film aesthetics. It is interesting to speculate whether the ‘zone’ approach and the mapping of 3D cinematic space will simply be a trend for the cinema or perhaps become the dominant mode of production/aesthetic - and relegate the traditional 2D filmic zones of classical cinema as a twentieth century concern.

Throughout this discussion you’ve mentioned a few online sources for film writing. Can you consolidate a hotlist of media theory blogs or online journals for interested readers?

That’s a big question, but recently I’ve been returning to these sites to (re)consider some of the things we have discussed here:

data-driven parenting

smith — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:56:07 -0400

Last week, Kevin Kelly wrote about a web service right on point with some of the recent projects examined here on Serial Consign. Trixie Tracker is a parental database and scheduling application developed by interface designer Ben MacNeill. The service is designed for parents to track the daily rhythms of their infant(s) and over time, build up a body of data pertaining to sleep schedules, diaper changes, breast feeding, milk inventory and diet development. The goal of collecting this information is to provide analytics to make for more efficient parenting (i.e. realizing and capitalizing on the fact that junior is very susceptible to 3 PM naps). Trixie Tracker is a commercial application based off the research, tracking and visualization that MacNeill has been engaged in since the birth of his daughter Trixie four years ago.

The above image is a Sleep Probability Chart which tracks the sleeping patterns of an infant over the course of a day at a resolution of 10 minutes. From top to bottom, the diagrams track the sleep habits of a newborn, a 6 month and year old infant. MacNeill describes the logic of the visualization as follows:

The Sleep Probability chart uses a gray scale to display the probability of your child being asleep at a certain time of day for the selected dates. Areas of high contrast (black and white) mean your child is on a predictable schedule. Areas of low contrast (light, middle and dark gray) mean a less regular schedule. A uniformly gray chart would mean a completely random sleep schedule.

Armed with crystal clear visualizations, which are in turn based on months of observations, parents would most certainly have the means to "optimize" their caregiving. In Kevin Kelly's post on the matter, he identified Trixie Tracker as just one example of a growing movement called Data-Driven Parenting. Dr. Spock please step aside and make way for Mr. Tufte!

[trixie tracker / sleep telemetry chart]

I recommend poking around on the Trixie Tracker site as it is a strange and wonderful experience to see web 2.0 aesthetics applied to parenting. One of MacNeill's most interesting pre-Trixie Tracker projects was his animated feeding chart based off data culled in 2003. MacNeill also took part in a 2006 interview on parentdish in which he contextualizes his views on data and parenting.

learning from liberty city

smith — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:35:29 -0400

The game lies in searching for happiness in the natural and innate desire to decide one's own life, constantly roving around in search of contexts and climates that are more favorable to one's personal mood, or realistically, in search of employment possibilities, becoming nomads in search of new opportunities for discovery and adventure, living in Constant's New Babylon freed from work, or enjoying the freedom of choice offered to us by the society of consumption, like one of the many figures that crowd the instant cities of Archigram.

The above quote is an excerpt from Alberto Iacovoni's 2004 text Game Zone: Playgrounds between Virtual Scenarios and Reality, a writing project that broadly examines urban space as an arena for play and transgression. The text discusses the legacy of the Situationist International, along with a variety of contemporary public space interventions and related paradigms and aesthetics culled from the last three decades of gaming. The book is not only an engaging read, but it serves as a convenient point of entry into discussion about the recent Rockstar Games title Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA4). The protagonist of GTA4 is one Niko Bellic, an Eastern European immigrant and war veteran with a checkered past and no qualms about renting his services out to various underworld figures. It his through his eyes that we view and experience the richly detailed Liberty City, an open, explorable metropolis which draws quite heavily on the landscape and landmarks of New York City.

In a recent BLDGBLOG interview, Geoff Manaugh talked to noted concept designer and art director Daniel Dociu about his work on the spatial design of Guild Wars. In introducing Dociu, Manaugh highlighted the fact that tens of thousands of people inhabited and experienced in-game architecture and that perhaps it was worth examining a little more closely. I completely agree with this sentiment and what follows is a close reading of the "virtual urbanism" of Liberty City as well as some discussion about this specific digital metropolis as a city-sized coliseum. In Ways of Seeing (Digital Space), a post from last October, I examined a handful of recent progressive gaming titles in light of architectural representation. This post will apply that same scrutiny to the game space of GTA4, but zoom out quite a bit and think at a city scale.

Production Design

The above image, which prominently displays the Broker Bridge merging with the urban fabric of one of Liberty City's four boroughs, indicates the degree of detail at play within GTA4. Liberty City is a massive assemblage of distinct neighbourhoods and districts based off the local flavour, texture and inhabitants of Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Manhattan and New Jersey. Liberty City is able to approximate these cities within a city so effectively through an elaborate network of roadway infrastructure, public transit systems, architecture, vehicles, pedestrians, signage, and even garbage and grime. Liberty City is simply brimming with stuff, and not that of the texture-mapped static backdrop variety, rather a living and breathing urban system with a tangible pulse that waxes and wanes over the course of each day and in response to the weather and progression through the game narrative. One only need look as far as the original trailer for GTA4 to see the lofty ambitions of the design team behind Liberty City as this video emulates the cinematography of Koyaanisqatsi, right down to the score (Philip Glass' Pruit Igoe). This staggering amount of detail has been scrutinized and summarized elsewhere and the heavily circulated Sightseeing in Liberty City photoset concisely illustrates how much specific aspects of Liberty City resonate with the landmarks and architecture of New York City.

Hyper-realistic stills don't really do Liberty City justice though. One needs to spend time exploring the city (not necessarily within the confines of the game narrative) to get a sense of how thoroughly this simulation of urban space has been thought through. Chatty cabbies, roadway construction, political campaigns, in-game media and an entire world of back alleys and urban texture help reinforce the notion that Liberty City is a plausible representation of urban space rather than simply a stage set. Beyond these details Liberty City is populated with a huge range of "extras", each with a style and unique backstory - one only need eavesdrop on a cell phone conversation or two to drive that latter point home. One of my favourite moments in GTA4 is the broadcast of a radio ad for Civil Service, an urban simulation game in which play revolves around the creation and micromanagement of a digital city. This satirical little wink at the audience not only provided the design team with a laugh but it also highlights the implicit genealogical connection between GTA4 and Will Wright's SimCity franchise.

[jim munroe / my trip to liberty city / 2003]

In a New York Magazine interview last month, Rockstar Games' Dan Houser described the relationship between Liberty City and The Big Apple as follows:

We try to get the essence of the place, not a photo-realistic, digital tourist guide. We wanted a kind of spiritual tourist guide that feels like New York, but a blown-out, larger-than-life version. We want it to feel you're the star of your own movie or TV show. We wanted an element of the classic New York of the seventies and eighties too.

According to this description, Liberty City is best considered a caricature rather than a simulation of a city. In considering cinematic equivalents, it would be wise to look to Martin Scorsese and the historical revisionism of Gangs of New York as an equally ambitious "over the top" exercise in urban production design. This conversation about GTA4 as tourism and of Liberty City as a legitimate destination makes the 2003 machinima short My Trip to Liberty City seem even more prescient.

The Evolution of Liberty City

Another factor to consider when examining Liberty City is that the metropolis is a work in progress. This is not a comment on the aforementioned in game roadway construction, but highlights the fact that the Liberty City in GTA4 is the fifth iteration of the city within the GTA franchise. Just as Calvino's Invisible Cities reveled in the perennial reconstruction and reiteration of Venice, the GTA series has been an extended reconsideration of Liberty City (as well as Vice City and San Andreas, based off Miami and California/Nevada respectively). When the current version of Liberty City (pictured above) is compared to the humble first attempt developed in the late 1990s, it is quite clear how much 3D graphics and open world gaming have come along in the last several years.

Liberty City also has an overt connection to an urban entity other than New York City - it is also the name of an extremely poor African-American neighbourhood in Miami. Ironically, the Wikipedia entry on Liberty City mentions that the neighbourhood is often described as a "model city" but "rarely, if ever described as such by anyone from South Florida". Liberty City is also notorious for the 1980 Liberty City Riots (in response to the acquittal of three white officers in the beating death of Arthur McDuffie), significant drug related violence in the late 1980s and the much lauded Meek Entrepreneurial Educational Center (MEEC), a satellite campus of Miami-Dade College. Given the depiction of urban space in the GTA series, the backstory of the actual Liberty City is an interesting counterpoint to the "digital approximation" of New York City.

Fatal Strategies

While thousands of hours of labour were dedicated to the design and construction of Liberty City there are certainly no pretenses about the fact that the pleasure of play in GTA4 is in the disruption and destruction of urban space. While the entire GTA franchise has had a mild obsession with cocaine, in-game intoxication is clearly derived from the intersection of ultraviolence and post-physics engine Ballardian crash aesthetics. GTA4 celebrates armaments and demolition driving with equal zeal and this heightened sensitivity of space, velocity and material creates a dynamic environment that craves carnage. The above video does a fantastic job of communicating how well the GTA4 physics engine can (man)handle bodies in motion and how this framework facilitates a full spectrum of sociopathic interventions. In Fatal Strategies Jean Baudrillard wrote about the prospect of harnessing the catastrophe:

...but that is pure madness. We might as well hope to capture the energy of automobile accidents, of dogs that have been run over, or of anything that collapses. (New hypothesis: if things have a greater tendency to disappear and collapse, perhaps the principal source of future energy will be accident and catastrophe.

It is this implausible energy source, a twisted metal fender-bender substrate that undergirds the narrative and gameplay in Liberty City.

[GTA4 mutliplayer mise-en-scène]

A cynical reading of GTA4 might delineate the game as an extended chain of cut scenes kneecapped by overly linear play, but once you step aside from the narrative proper and embrace the way the game represents and engages urban space, it is hard not be thrilled. In fact, the "purest" play that occurs in Liberty City takes place when you abandon the narrative altogether in multiplayer mode, where urban space becomes a gigantic coliseum in which a dozen or so players engage in a continuous collaborative action sequence the likes of which Michael Bay could never hope to equal.

The essence of appreciating Liberty City (truly a "model city") is a perverse love/hate relationship with civic order and urban space. This hypothetical American metropolis is compelling because it serves as an environs in which to reimagine present day New York City while acting as a benchmark for future living, breathing fictional cities.

periodic table of architecture

smith — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:43:09 -0400

Having connections to web development and architectural practice (I've developed sites for two architecture studios), I'm rather opinionated about the manner in which firms archive and market themselves online. In general, I think the presence of most architecture firms on the web is tremendously underwhelming and the organization of an online portfolio almost always boils down to the "timeline vs. project typology" binary. That said, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across the web site for LOHA: Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects this past weekend.

The LOHA site mimics the structure and appearance of the Periodic Table of Elements and proposes a classification system for pertinent information associated with architectural practice. As illustrated in the screen capture above, the interface for the site is essentially the project archives and entries are categorized into news, project types, firm recognition and publications—all the information you'd expect a firm to provide. What makes this site interesting is the fact that you have access to everything at once with a "viewer" for displaying related photo-content. The site champions information and access to it rather than photography and this is a welcome change considering the all-too-familiar strategy of tacking a sickly UI onto a glorified slideshow. The empty cells that currently separate clusters of nodes will allow for a fair amount of future expansion, so it looks like this site has a lifespan of several years before a redesign.

Given the idiosyncratic nature of this interface, it is accompanied by a mini-legend which explains the nomenclature used in tagging each cell. Each cell features an abbreviation of the project name, the year completed, the square footage and colour coded tags which denote project type (residential, commercial, etc.) and other information (i.e. if the project has been published or received any awards). When you scroll over the various cells you get an interesting reading of the connectivity within the work and information archived across the site - it is really quite a pleasure to explore this archive! Kudos to the sayFINN design agency for this work.

Some tangentially related links: this project immediately made me remember the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods and Catalogtree's site is another great example of an interface that champions an indexical approach and visual identity.