Friday, April 15. 2011
Via dpr-barcelona
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The relationship between architecture and photography is so old as both disciplines. While Anne Elisabeth Toft asks “Is it possible to capture, translate and transmit architectural experience via representations?” we can recall to the most recent work of the filmmaker and artist Wim Wenders, called Places, strange and quiet which is based on a fascinating series of large-scale photographs taken in countries around the world from Salvador, Brazil; Palermo, Italy; Onomichi, Japan to Berlin, Germany; Brisbane, Australia, Armenia and the United States. Wenders pointed on his latest publication:
When you travel a lot, and when you love to just wander around and get lost, you can end up in the strangest spots. I have a huge attraction to places. Already when I look at a map, the names of mountains, villages, rivers, lakes or landscape formations excite me, as long as I don’t know them and have never been there … I seem to have sharpened my sense of place for things that are out of place. Everybody turns right, because that’s where it’s interesting, I turn left where there is nothing! And sure enough, I soon stand in front of my sort of place. I don’t know, it must be some sort of inbuilt radar that often directs me to places that are strangely quiet, or quietly strange.
But what about photographing not buildings, but landscape, urban voids and ruins? Can we talk about the same relationship as in between architecture and photography?
Most of Wim Wenders‘ photographs are created during his personal travels and while location-scouting for his films. From his iconic images of exteriors and buildings to his panoramic depictions of towns and landscapes, it’s not strange to find some of his movies accompanied by photo exhibitions and publications such as The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty as part of The Million Dollar Hotel or his 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club which was featured with the companion book by Wim Wenders and Donata Wenders.
Wim Wenders was a painter before he started working on film and photography, and he talked about this in an interview with Michael Coles:
I was heavily influenced by the so-called New American Underground. A lot of American painters made movies in the mid to late ’60s, Warhol being the most famous one. There was a whole retrospective traveling through Europe at the time. I saw these films in ’66 or ’67, and that was very important for me. I wrote about them, too. I wrote about Michael Snow especially, and a film that he had made called Wavelength (1967). It was the first article I wrote. Wavelength was a painter’s film. It was actually only one shot, a painstakingly slow zoom across a room toward the windows. Day and night were passing. Nothing much happened. It was very painterly. My first films were basically landscape paintings, except that they were shot with a movie camera. I never moved the frame. Nothing ever happened in them. Each scene lasted as long as a 16-millimeter daylight reel, which was about four minutes. There was no editing involved, other than attaching one reel to the other.
Wenders photographic work is obviously very cinematic. His approach to catch the right moment and the right place, his sensibility to transmit with images what a urban place can mean and the way he freezes different urban context is widely poetic and full of literary references.
Wenders points that he doesn’t think that any photographer has anything else in mind than that particular moment he is capturing. This is the main guideline of the photo-work of the exhibition that will take place at the Haunch of Venison, in London.
“…but a story,
from that story came a script,
and from the script a film -
which never wanted to conceal
that it might just as well have become a song:
a song about a different America
beyond that great big Dream,
where truly
everyone
is
equal.”
- Wim Wenders
As he said, “discovering the story that a place wants to tell. That’s my main concern, my attitude. Listening to the place. For me, taking a picture is more an act of listening, so to speak, than of seeing.” Now, the questions hidden in every picture are always the same:
What happened to that place? What happened to those people? How does this house or this street or this landscape look now, 10 or 30 years later?
—–
Image credits:
[1] Ferris Wheel, Armenia 2008, C-Print, 151,3 x 348 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[2] Open Air Screen, Palermo 2007, C-Print, 186×213 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[3] The Red Bench, Onomichi, 2005, C-Print, 186 x 200,6 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[4] Cemetery in the City, Tokyo 2008, C-Print, 132×133 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[5] Moscow Backyard, Moskau 2006, C-Print, 125×139 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[6] Ferris Wheel (Reverse Angle), Armenia 2008, C-Print, 151,3 x 348 cm © Wenders Images GbR
The book Places, strange and quiet has been published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. More info at their web-site
Thursday, April 14. 2011
Via GOOD
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by Ben Jervey
As I've said before, concentrated solar power (the "other" kind of solar—not photovoltaic panels) is a core component of any carbon-free energy future. This week, the United States is one giant step closer to plugging in the world's largest concentrated solar power plant—Brightsource's Ivanpah plant—which will pump out a massive 392 Megawatts of clean, solar energy in the Mojave Desert as soon as 2013. A rendition of the enormous project is above.
The project took a big leap from business plan to reality this week with two serious funding deals. First, Google announced its largest energy investment ever—placing a $168 million bet on Brightsource. The same day, the Department of Energy finalized a whopping $1.6 billion in loan guarantees for the project. "Today's announcement is creating over 1,000 jobs in California," said Energy Secretary Steven Chu, "while laying the foundation for thousands more clean energy jobs across the country in the future."
Not familiar with this core clean energy solution? Here's how I described it a couple years ago:
Whereas photovoltaic panels directly convert sunlight into an electric current, concentrated solar uses the sun's heat energy itself to generate power. [...] The intense heat boils the water, which creates steam. The steam spins a turbine, and-voila!-electricity is generated. Under optimum conditions, the plant can churn out 20 megawatts of juice, enough to power 10,000 homes.
Here's an illustration from our graphics team from a few years back:
So just how big is the potential for concentrated solar? A recent study found that 1,000 square miles of the Mojave Desert devoted to CSP could produce enough energy to power the entire country. On a grander scale, less than one percent of the world's deserts could power the whole world, if transmission lines could accommodate the electricity. In other words, plants like Ivanpah can absolutely replace coal-burning power plants in sunny areas.
Here's Brightsource's test site in Israel, where it's proving the technology.
I found it interesting that the Department of Energy and Google made these funding announcements on the same day. Such public-private cooperation seems to represent the best path forward for clean energy absent any federal legislation or mandate.
Monday, April 11. 2011
Via Treehugger
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Crowds gather at Guangzhou Railway Station for the New Year exodus in 'Last Train Home.' Image: Zeitgeist Films
Every year, 130 million people throng China's railway stations, frantically trying to obtain a seat on a train that will take them home for the lunar New Year -- a trip that is for many rural people living and working in the country's industrial cities their only chance to see the families, and even the children, they have left behind. In addition to the human drama, the trek, believed to constitute the largest human migration in the world, taxes the country's transportation systems to the limit.
The chaos at the train stations, the stark difference between urban and rural China, and the alienation among families of economic migrants are strikingly portrayed in the new documentary "Last Train Home" by Lixin Fan, who previously worked on the acclaimed film "Up The Yangtze," about the controversial Three Gorges Dam.
In his debut feature, which screened at this year's If! Istanbul Independent Film Festival, the director focuses on one couple who have been making the New Year's trip for 16 years, their sole break from a life of difficult factory labor. But, of course, they are not alone. In addition to their millions of counterparts in China, a similar migration occurs each year in Indonesia, where 30 million workers go home for the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan.
Mass Migrations Tax Transit Systems
Such mass migrations "present enormous logistical and safety challenges to local, state, and national governments," Jonna McKone wrote recently for the urban transportation blog The City Fix. "Transport systems are designed ideally to handle maximum capacity, but very few can deal with an additional yearly surge in migrants... [In Indonesia], this important holiday has become a nightmare, as millions of city dwellers attempt to return to their villages but face limited transport options."
According to the New York Times, Ramadan travelers in Indonesia "brave enormous jams, exhaustion, and bandits to make it back home," with hundreds dying on the road each year. Though the Indonesian government makes efforts ahead of the holiday to repair roads and carry out other initiatives to ease travel, McKone writes, the problem will remain as long as the world's massive cities continue to expand at the expense of investment in the environment and rural regions.
More On China's Cities
Water Shortages Could Slow China's Growth
China's Zero-Carbon City Dongtan Delayed, But Not Necessarily Dead, Says Planner
Beijing's Olympic Pollution Solution: Luck + Data Manipulation
Greening China's Mayors: A Q&A with Dr. Steve Hammer of the Mayoral Training Program on Energy
Urban China Magazine: 'An Encyclopedia of Chinese Cities in a Time of Junk'
A Video Clip Is Worth ... Linfen, China: The Most Polluted City in the World
Treading Heavily on the Environment: China's Growing Eco-Footprint
Via information aesthetics
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Next to their established offices in Boston and Milan, MIT Senseable Lab is now also active in Singapore, where they just launched an impressive exhibition [senseable.mit.edu] with five different graphical perspectives into Singapore's social, economic and mobility patterns. The five visualizations are all based on real-time data recorded and captured by a vast system of communication devices, microcontrollers and sensors.
What seems to be in the pipeline is an open API to allow others access to the rich data streams: "The exhibition is just the beginning of something that aims to develop into an open platform for the management of urban real-time data and the engagement of developer communities in writing innovative applications for the city."
"Hub of the World" shows the ships and containers arriving and leaving Singapore. "Isochronic Singapore" deformes a street map of the city proportional to its travel time. "Raining Taxis" combines taxi and rainfall data to establish the experience of not finding any taxis when it rains. "Urban Heat Islands" combines ambient temperature and energy usage to investigate whether cities are indeed warmer than the surrounding environment. "Formula One City" conveys the impact of the sports competition, for instance in terms of geo-located text messaging behavior. Lastly, "Real Time Talk" indicates the level of cellphone network usage throughout the city.
The exhibition runs from April 8th until May 1st at Singapore Art Museum.
Monday, April 04. 2011
Via Lift via Contemporary Spaces
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When one of the world's prominent thinker about global thinking takes a look at "smart cities", the result differs from what most of the Industry tends to say - and that's why we like it:
"I have long thought that all the major infrastructures in a city—from sewage to electricity and broadband—should be encased in transparent walls and floors at certain crossroads, such as bus stops or public squares. If you can actually see it all, you can get engaged. Today, when walls are pregnant with software, why not make this visible? (...) The challenge for intelligent cities is to urbanize the technologies they deploy, to make them responsive and available to the people whose lives they affect. Today, the tendency is to make them invisible, hiding them beneath platforms or behind walls—hence putting them in command rather than in dialogue with users. One effect will be to reduce the possibility that intelligent cities can promote open-source urbanism, and that is a pity. It will cut their lives short. They will become obsolete sooner. Urbanizing these intelligent cities would help them live longer because they would be open systems, subject to ongoing changes and innovations. After all, that ability to adapt is how our good old cities have outlived the rise and fall of kingdoms, republics, and corporations."
Cities are the places where Lift France '11's five key topics (OPEN, CARE, GREEN, LEARN, SLOW) will congregate. We're therefore especially happy that Saskia Sassen has agreed to give the opening speech.
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