Wednesday, September 01. 2010Kim Høltermand
Nice and fresh update from Kim Høltermand and his rather beautiful portfolio. Reminiscent of sci-fi and fantasy landscapes, his new series Tuve includes a collection of brilliantly captured rocks that hang suspended in an air-water ether like satellites.
Google’s Earth - William GibsonVia /Message ----- Google’s Earth - William Gibson (The New York Times): Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. Gibson wonders about Google’s role in our world, and how it is a reflection of us, a tool that shapes us as we use it. Personal comment:
Gibson's article starts with this sentence by Eric Schmidt (Google's CEO): "I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.". This probably tells a bit about where Google aims to go.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
10:06
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, data, fiction, mining, science & technology, search, writing
Monday, August 16. 2010Play Time----- In his irresistible 1967 Play Time, Jacques Tati anticipated Jean Baudrillard by conceiving a city in which modernist simulacra had substituted for the “real” presence of traditional urban icons and representations.
Thus, the “real” Paris appears to a group of American tourists as only a transient mirror-image in some of the many transparent surfaces that invade the film. Samewise, the modernist slab appears throughout the movie as a repetitive symbol of the modern holiday vista – be it in Honolulu or Benidorm. (...) Related Links:Monday, August 09. 2010Anachronism (or uchronism?) -- Star Wars as (if) it was made in the 1920ies
Related Links:Personal comment: A funny anachronic short movie for the return of vacations!
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society
at
10:44
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, customization, design (motion), fiction, interferences, movie, science & technology
Thursday, July 15. 2010Robot memory in Blade RunnerRoy Batty, in Blade Runner, who tells Deckard about the things he saw in his life and how all those memories would vanish. He is about to die and give this memorable final speech:
…when a replicant/robot loved his life and tells what it meant. Why do I blog this? a curious quote to be used at some point.
Personal comment: And a memorable act by holland actor Rutger Hauer! Tuesday, June 01. 2010“I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”Via Pasta & Vinegar ----- by Nicolas Nova
From Ubik, by Philip K. Dick (1969):
Why do I blog this I really enjoy this quote and find it exemplifies the ever-increasing delegation of decisions that are embedded/inscribed into technical objects. The Ubik door might certainly be the ubicomp posterchild in a parallel (and dystopic) environment but it seems highly plausible nowadays. Let’s accumulate this kind of examples and see what patterns one can find. Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Interaction design, Science & technology
at
10:52
Defined tags for this entry: books, computing, culture & society, fiction, interaction design, monitoring, science & technology, surveillance, ubiquitous
Wednesday, May 26. 2010Wandering through the futureVia Near Future Laboratory
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by julian
@chriswoebken spied this one — an art film by Marjolijn Dijkman (NL, if you couldn’t guess) called Wandering Through the Future in which the artist takes 70 science fiction films and uses them to explore how they imagine the future. In an interview, there are some curious and relevant sentiments surrounding the production of the film — particularly this observation that the nearer in the future the film takes place, the more recent the film is. It’s as if we’re trying ever harder to imagine a possible near future, whereas in the earlier days of science fiction film, it was expected to imagine some time far, far in the future. There’s also a timeline that goes along with it, evidently, of stand-out quotes from the films. I’m guessing this time line is also apparent in a recent book When I collected all the scenes for this project I couldn’t find a single optimistic future scenario. It started as a timeline of the future along which I placed all the films I could find according to the fictional date when they are set. The distant future is mostly represented through films from the early days of science fiction cinema, and in general the closer you get to visions of the near-present, the more recent the film. Scenarios change from Barbarella rocking in her space ship in 40,000 AD to almost hyper-realistic and feasible scientific models of the future in which nothing is playful at all. I think in the 1960s and 70s culture you could still imagine far future scenarios, but nowadays people are already so afraid of the coming 30 years that they cannot think ahead. We live in a science fiction future already; the future of sci-fi has shrunk from the day after tomorrow to today. Yet we should think beyond science fiction and face the future in a different way. The films which comprise Wandering Through the Future often represent a worldwide apocalypse – the entire earth variously becomes frozen, a desert, flooded, contaminated by influenza, a single totalitarian state or taken over by robots. Cinema here does not think of local scenarios or the possibility that different phenomena might happen in different places and at different scales. It’s important to stress that we cannot only paralyse each other with fearful scenarios for entertainment but we should also think of possibilities and create new scenarios to be able to imagine a long term future again.
Related Dispatches:
Related Links:Tuesday, May 18. 2010Ghosts Of The Future: Borrowing Architecture From The Zone Of AlienationVia BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: From Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky].
[Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol]. During the period in which 3D videogames began to use textures imported from photography, rather than hand-drawn pixel tiles, it became common to hear game developers discuss their photo references. Drew Markham, director of Return To Castle Wolfenstein, spent the 2001 pre-release press tour for his game talking about the time he had spent in Europe, sourcing textures from "real" locations that had played host to the war. Crumbling French flagstones, Teutonic concretes, and other useful built surfaces: these details would add a certain level of authenticity that other games lacked. When the Wolfenstein sequel finally arrived, British gaming journalists were amused to see the ubiquitous British "H" fire hydrant signs scattered deep within the occult bunkers of Himmler's SS Paranormal Division. [Image: Photo by Jim Rossignol]. A few years later, another photo-reference tour was being cited for the gaming press, only this time it was not a cheery holiday in Europe, but a trip to the Zone Of Alienation. This 30km area of Ukraine and Belarus remains poisoned and largely off-limits to mankind, thanks to the radioactive caesium that dusted it after the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986. While it has remained quarantined and closed to (legal) habitation, it hasn't kept out sight-seers. The production team at GSC Gameworld, a games studio based in nearby Kiev, intended to use the derelict zone as the basis for environments in their action shooter, STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl. The team went into the zone and photographed urban dereliction: a snapshot of an abandoned Soviet Union. They would go on to fill their game world with the zone's rusting fences and collapsing grain silos, but that was not all that came with the material: the landscape and its decaying architecture was already charged with mythology—with narrative. Creative director Anton Bolshakov explained this in an interview in 2007: "The Soviet system was sealed, many facts were kept secret. Even the most harmless objectives or events generated unbelievable rumours and legends." One example, he says, is
The antenna wall—actually an early-warning radar system developed for Cold War defense, which has been preserved thanks to being inside the zone—made it into the game as "the brain scorcher," a device that must be shut down before the player can progress into the abandoned city of Pripyat. The environment of Chernobyl not only provided the game with an authentic atmosphere, it was also to influence the events that players could experience. [Image: The "brain scorcher," via Jim Rossignol]. However, the zone as an idea already existed before the explosion in 1986. It appeared, for instance, in a 1972 science fiction novel called Roadside Picnic. A mysterious, contaminated pocket of landscape, quarantined from the outside world, was the main theme of that book, which was written by two brothers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. In the Strugatsky's book, an alien visitation to the earth—an extra-terrestrial "roadside picnic"—has left dangerous and incomprehensible materials strewn across a zone of Northern Canada. Although sealed off for scientific research, this zone is raided by "Stalkers" who sell the unnatural trinkets for black-market cash. To do so, they brave bizarre dangers, because the zone has been transformed into a place that is utterly at odds with our own world. The alien is never seen or even described, and all the characters encounter is its terrible remainder: landscape made alien. Pools of jelly that will cripple a man lurk in basements, extra-terrestrial cobwebs that can stop a heart beating are strung across doorways, and gravitational mantraps will crush anyone who passes over the wrong patch of mud. The zone of Roadside Picnic was seen by many as an allegory for the entire Soviet experiment: not simply in the literal sense of the poisoned landscapes created by the industrial excesses of the region, but the entire social order that was created by the Communist government. Polluted expanses, continually washed by acid rain, became shorthand for describing the bizarre political situation of a country in which Communism had failed, and yet robotically continued. Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky shot a movie, called Stalker, which told a story based on that of Roadside Picnic. A glacially slow, almost event-free film about landscape and longing, it's a work that lingers for long minutes over broken wastelands of abandoned industry. It encapsulates Tarkovsky's style, as well as his interest in dereliction and decay—themes that would be revisited by the STALKER videogame, thirty years on. [Image: From Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky]. Tarkovsky's film manages to imbue derelict industrial landscapes with a terrible sense of threat. Largely unable to realize the alien properties of artifacts in Roadside Picnic, Tarkovsky projected the danger into the architecture itself. Passive landscapes that could swallow a man. Tunnels which tear them to shreds. These effects were never demonstrated, but also never doubted, thanks to the tentative way the actors explored their surroundings. In much the same way that the images of the real Chernobyl zone seem like lush vegetative scenes, despite being formidably radioactive, so Tarkovsky's zone is calm and invisibly dangerous. Cinematic legend had it that the power station shown in the final background scenes of the film was in fact Chernobyl NPP, although the truth is the entire film was shot in Estonia. That's not to say that Stalker was without poisonous consequences of its own, however. The first version of the movie was shot entirely on corrupted film, which was unsalvageable when Tarkovsky's production team returned to their Russian studios. Worse, the second shooting took place down stream from a poorly regulated chemical works. The effluent from the plant was responsible for many of the astonishing visuals in the river scenes from the movie, but team members came to suffer serious side-effects from this exposure, including cancer. They had, it seems, suffered side-effects from their time in the zone: just like the fate of the fictional Stalkers in the Strugatsky books. It was as if the fiction and reality were blurring back through each other. As if—to quote Alan Moore—the written page was too fragile a boundary. Or perhaps, as Steven Shaviro suggests in his book Connected, Roadside Picnic, like all science fiction, actually exists to cast a shadow over the present. "It shows us how profoundly haunted we are by what has not yet happened," says Shaviro of science fiction writing. In the specific case of Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky's film, what had not happened yet was the Chernobyl disaster. After 1986, however, there were others for whom the ideas of Roadside Picnic were to be immediately accessible and useful in describing the world that they faced. People going into the Chernobyl exclusion zone, to loot buildings or show tourists around, began to call themselves "Stalkers." For them, the zone of the Strugatsky's vision was immediate and first-hand, a kind of fictional reference for the reality they were facing. They were living it—and it was strangely convenient to have the Stalker nomenclature to hand. [Images: STALKER game images from this very extensive Flickr set]. As for Bolshakov and his creative team, borrowing from both the Strugatskys and the real world has proven fruitful. Real world ruins seem to connect with players far more readily than their fantasy counterparts. No one has been able to come away from STALKER without talking about the architectural waste that GSC borrowed from the zone. The game has now reached three iterations and supports an energetic fan community. Bolshakov suggests that there is more to this than simply commerce or escapism, however: "The motif behind STALKER was to create a game which would remind people of the Chernobyl accident and at the same time warn mankind against any possible fatal mistakes in the future." The warning seems likely to go unheard, but perhaps it has another message: to tell game developers that the architecture of the real world comes prefixed with meaning. Even now, when cities can be raised procedurally from the blank canvas of a game engine, perhaps it's worth taking a look at the real world and the mythology that has been strewn around it. If borrowing architecture from the zone proves anything, it's that simulation should not exist in a vacuum. Jim Rossignol is a games critic, blogger, occasional guest writer on BLDGBLOG, and author of the excellent This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities, published by the University of Michigan Press. He is @jimrossignol on Twitter.
Related Links:Personal comment: Amazing antennas! ...
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Interaction design
at
08:53
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, fiction, games, interaction design, movie, science & technology
Monday, May 10. 2010DreamlandsVia e-storming ----- Allan de Souza, The Goncourt Brothers stand between Caesar and the Thief of Bagdad, 2003 DREAMLANDS -----
Wednesday, January 20. 2010They Will Build Clouds For Us[Image: A C-141 Starlifter flying toward sunset; via Wikimedia]. ----- Via BLDGBLOG
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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