Atmosphere 2011 - Mediated Cities
 
Fev 3-5  Atmosphere 2011

Faculté d'Architecture  Université du Manitoba
La Cité Médiatrice

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Adhya, Anirban
Architecture and Design, Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan
MAPMAKING-STORYTELLING-PLACEMAKING: FINDING HUMAN ECOLOGIES AND SPATIAL GEOGRAPHIES IN METRO DETROIT


Akçay, Ayşegül
Department of Architecture, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
THE REPRESENTATION OF CITY IMAGES IN CINEMA: THE CASE OF RENAISSANCE


Annandale, David
Department of English, Film and Theatre, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
SPACE AS SATIRE IN GRAND THEFT AUTO


Aquino, Eduardo
Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Shanski, Karen
Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
SEARCHLIGHT


Austin Smith, Brenda
Department of English, Film and Theatre, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
DIVINE INTERVENTION: “THIRDSPACE” AND THE OCCUPIED CITY


Bard, Perry
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA: THE GLOBAL REMAKE


Bashara, Daniel
School of Communication, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
UNLIMITED ANIMATION: ARCHITECTURAL SPACE AND THE POSTWAR AMERICAN CARTOON


Bird, Lawrence
Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
BEYOND THE DESERT OF THE REAL: REGENERATIVE NARRATIVES IN THE CITYSCAPE


Boumeester, Marc
School of Design and Media Sciences, University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, Delft, The Netherlands
CITY AND THE AGENCY OF MOVING IMAGE APRÈS DEBORD


Bourbonnais, Julie, Lucie Paquet and Jonathan Yu
Montréal, Quebéc
138 VS 1: DOCUMENTATION OF NORDICITY : A COMPARATIVE LOOK AT ROUTE 138 IN QUÉBEC AND ROUTE 1 IN ICELAND


Bourbonnais, Julie, Lucie Paquet and Jonathan Yu
Montréal, Quebéc
DRIVE-THRU


Calder, David
School of Communication, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
ACTIVIST ARCHAEOLOGY: MEMORIES OF DEINDUSTRIALIZATION IN KOMPLEXKAPHARNAÜM’S PLAYREC


Crow, Jason
School of Architecture, McGill University, Montréal, Québec
MEDITATIONS ON A SNOWBALL FIGHT


Doz, Daniel
Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary
THE CITY AT NIGHT | A TOPOLOGICAL CINEMATIC LABYRINTH


El-Hadi, Nehal
Program in Planning, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario
READING URBAN SPACE AS HYPERTEXT: NAVIGATING DUNDAS SQUARE


Ginckels, Peterjan
Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Ghent, Belgium
SPEED LAB. A TACTICAL EXPLORATION OF THE IMAGE


Gladdys, Katerie
Digital Media Department, University of Florida, Gainsville, Florida
STROLLER FLÂNEUR


Gladdys, Katerie
Digital Media Department, University of Florida, Gainsville, Florida
THY NEIGHBOR’S FRUIT


Harrop, Patrick
Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba
Madan, Emmanuel
[The User], Montréal
Miyazaki, Shintaro
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
THE INDUCTIVE CITY


Holmquist, Paul
School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec
Crow, Jason
School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec
INTO THE MXT


Hsu, Frances
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia
CCTV


Huber, Nicole
Department of Architecture, College of Built Environments, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
MEDIATED ATMOSPHERES: THE CINEMATIC CITY AS ENVIRONMENTAL CRITIQUE


Knudtson, Rori
College of Arts and Media, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado
Langhorst, Joern
College of Architecture and Planning, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado
MAPPING DETROIT, AN INVESTIGATION IN LISTENING IN ORDER TO SEE


Landrum, Lisa
Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
PERSISTENT MEDIA: PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGES IN AND BEYOND TATIVILLE


Marchessault, Janine
Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization, York University, Toronto
"TERRE DES HOMMES/MAN AND HIS WORLD": EXPO '67 AS GLOBAL MEDIA EXPERIMENT


McCarthy, Christine
Interior Architecture Programme, School of Architecture, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
INTIMATE DISJUNCTIONS: CINEMATIC TECHNIQUE AS INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE


McIntosh, Thomas
[The User], Montréal
[THE USER] - REFLECTIONS ON THE IMPLICATIONS OF PLASTIC CUTLERY


Mina, Andrea
School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
INTIMATE IMMENSITIES; MINIATURES, AN INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE;


Miyazaki, Shintaro
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
URBAN AREAS AS TRANS-SONIC INFOSPHERES


Nason, Joshua
College of Architecture, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas
AWKWARD MAPPING


Newell, Catie
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
LUCENT CITY : LIGHTS OUT


Nikolov, Nik
Department of Art, Architecture and Design, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
The Living Projection: Understanding the Cinemetric Dimension of Architecture


Puff, Jonathan
ROADSTEADING ON THE ACADIAN HARBORWORKS: A WELL DESIGNED FICTION


Rivard, Érick
Vachon, Geneviève
School of Architecture, Université Laval, Quebec City, Québec
INTENSITY + LANDSCAPE: CREATIVE USE OF VIDEO AND MODELS FOR A SENSITIVE READING OF THE CONTEMPORARY CITY


Rizzo, Agatino
Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar
P2P URBANISM: HOW INTERNET IS GENERATING NEW PLANNING THEORIES AND IMPLEMENTATION APPROACHES FOR THE FUTURE CITY.


Robinson, Ian
Programme in Communication and Culture, York University, Toronto, Ontario
TOWARDS A THEORY OF CINEMA AND PLACE


Sandercock, Leonie
School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
Attili, Giovanni
Faculty of Engineering, University of Rome, Rome, Italy
FINDING OUR WAY (BEYOND CANADA'S APARTHEID): FILM AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION


Shieh, Rosalyne
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
SPONGE URBANISM


Stieffenhofer, Katharina
Growing Local Productions, Winnipeg, Manitoba
“…AND THIS IS MY GARDEN” - MEDIA FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: DISSEMINATION OF IDEAS AND PROPAGATION OF PRACTICE


Szczepaniak-Gillece, Jocelyn
School of Communications, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
A SUBLIME MACHINE: BENJAMIN SCHLANGER AND THE IDEAL MOVIE THEATRE


Torres-Mondrego, Eunate
University of Geneva / Bande Itinérante (Switzerland)
Atelier de Paisaje, Getxo (Spain) / Campan (France)
"STALKSCAPES" CINEMATIC EXPERIMENTS IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND BEYOND


Tripodi, Loprenzo
Berlin, Germany
EXPLORING THE CINEMATIC CITY



Udow, Sara
Programme in Communications and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities, Toronto, Ontario
GLOBAL ROOTS: TRANSFORMING PUBLIC SPACE THROUGH NARRATIVE


van Lierop, Dea
Department of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
INTERVIEWING THE URBAN: MEMORY AND THE (POST-)CITY


Vidal, Ricarda
School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, United Kingdom
CLOCKWORK THAMESMEAD: THE CELLULOID LIVES OF A CONCRETE UTOPIA


Waite, Jason
International Guerrilla Video Festival, London, United Kingdom
THE INTERNATIONAL GUERRILLA VIDEO FESTIVAL


Willis, Katharine S.
Graduate School Locating Media, University of Siegen, Germany
HYBRID PLACES. LOCATING MEDIA IN URBAN PUBLIC SPACE


YinHua, Chu
Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, United Kingdom
MISE EN SCÈNE THE IMAGINED CITY IN PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES


Zarzycki, Andrzej
College of Architecture and Design, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey
MAPPING web2.0 TO city2.0














Adhya, Anirban
Architecture and Design, Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan
MAPMAKING-STORYTELLING-PLACEMAKING: FINDING HUMAN ECOLOGIES AND SPATIAL GEOGRAPHIES IN METRO DETROIT


This paper examines a framework for city and urban regions inspired by theories placemaking (Schneekloth and Shibley, 1995) and practice of cartography (Rankin, 2010; Fischer, 2010). With this premise, an empirical study of the Detroit Metropolitan Region (Metro Detroit) is undertaken. Specifically, mapping is employed as a medium to identify, describe, analyze, and illustrate human relationships and spatial configuration in the region. This considers cartographic methodology as a tool that becomes a dialogic space for storytelling and a creative process of placemaking. Mapmaking is understood as a form of critical social practice mediating with complex social, economic, cultural and political agencies and their relations.


METRO DETROIT
Detroit has long been a poster-child of unsustainable urban condition characterized by urban depopulation, infrastructure deterioration, racial and political fragmentation, and resource devaluation. In conclusion of his text The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Thomas Sugrue (1996) noted that Detroit will require creative responses to interconnected forces of race, residence, discrimination, and industrial decline stemming from the post-war urban transformations of an unresolved past. Facing these interconnected forces; Metro Detroit needs a comprehensive approach that shares a vision of a regional public realm. The continued differences between the city and the suburbs within Metro Detroit region
are just not just political or economic. The obstacle for a prosperous region, instead, fuels from people’s apprehensions about a regional identity.


MAPPING METHODOLOGY
Reconstituting the public realm of a region requires changes in the way it is imagined (Shibley, Schneekloth and Hovey, 2003). In Metro Detroit, human ecologies and spatial geographies of regional fragmentation play important role in influencing the metropolitan morphology. The complex phenomenon is explained through empirical documentation (literature review, archival study, naturalistic observation, and analysis) and mapping that (a) highlights traditional dimensions (historic boundaries, political conflicts, social demographics, economic investments) and that (b) illustrates non-conventional parameters (sense of place, new media, and creative partnerships). Mapping is undertaken to capture the imagination of a region through visualization, to tell the story of a region through its shared history and geography, and to enact policies and interventions through collective action. In particular, five shared resources—natural resources and ecosystem, infrastructure of transportation and information network, enterprise in arts and culture, industrial wealth and economic opportunities, and public amenities and pool of human resource—are illustrated as priority areas for investment and intervention.


MAPPING AS STORYTELLING AND PLACEMAKING
The framework of mapping integrates strategic regionalism, storytelling, and placemaking; leading to a possible urban model for Metro Detroit and other urban regions. Vision of such a shared Metro Detroit acknowledges diverse communities, their commonalities, their differences, their voices, and their stories. This new mapping model could empower communities to curve an important role in the region, illustrating a shared dialogic space and a creative placemaking process through collective imagination, citizen.


References
Canter, D.V. (1977). The Psychology of Place. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Citizens Research Council of Michigan and Shelton, D. (1978). Southeast Michigan Regionalism.
Mathewson, K. (Ed.). The Regionalist Papers. Southfield, MI: Metropolitan Fund, Inc.
Krysan, M., & Bader, M. (2007). Perceiving the metropolis: Seeing the city through a prism of race. Social Forces, 86 (2), 699-733.
Schneekloth, L.H. & Shibley, R.G. (1995). Placemaking: art and science of making places. New York, NY: John Wiley.
Shibley, R.G., Schneekloth, L.H., & Hovey, B. (2003). Constituting the Public Realm of a Region: Placemaking in the Bi-National Niagaras. Journal of Architectural Education. 17 (1), 28-42.
Sinclair, R. & Thompson, B. (1977). Metropolitan Detroit: An Anatomy of Social Change. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
Sugrue, T.J. (1996). The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


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Akçay, Ayşegül
Department of Architecture, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
THE REPRESENTATION OF CITY IMAGES IN CINEMA: THE CASE OF RENAISSANCE


In the early 19th century, the relationship between architecture and cinema became effective; the interaction between these two visual art forms became more visible during the 1920s. The technological developments in the Industrial revolution which changed the society had an expanded reflection also on cinema. In this period the city became an object for mass production in cinema thus the urban images, spaces and environments have become more related and more expressed in films. The production process in cinema by using more advanced methods gradually become more important and the design of the spaces produced in this process begin to be more pronounced.


The city became a significant area of representation following the improvements in the cinematic techniques. The representation of the architectural spaces changed from being simple backgrounds; while creating the images of the city, “architectural images” turned into very important tools for conveying the essence of a film. The film gained an identity especially with the architectural images.


In both cinema and architecture the representation of images shows how space can be reinterpreted in different ways. Therefore generating new designs, spaces either as foreground or background and also their represented images become a design task in cinema.


Furthermore the interaction between the existing city images and the future ones started to create a hybrid urban visuality. Such designs have the potential of reshaping the future city landscapes as displayed in cinema; the architectural city image which became a vital component of cinema can provide clues about how future will look like or how it can affect the architectural design process in the city scale. Thus creating a virtual reality with developed methods and the reflections of these imaginary creations (designs) in real urban contexts has become a field of research and study for both cinema and architecture.


This paper aims to illustrate the spatial transformations of architectural city images in cinema. In this context architectural city images used in Renaissance (film by Christian Volkman), will be analyzed by reading the representation of ‘space’ and ‘city’. The interaction between architecture and cinema will be discussed by using the concepts of ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘continuity’ in the context of film genre characteristics. The representation of space and urban architecture in Renaissance reflects a responsive product. The film articulates space and time notions in order to depict the essence of the product and while doing that it uses architecture as a tool. Therefore the city images which developed by new urban typologies become a vital character in film by engaging within the contexts of form, function and material. In this paper the analysis of the film will also focus on the design methods used in the film and the production of the city images in the film. Initially asked questions will be about the type of city images that the film produces and the production process of these images.


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Annandale, David
Department of English, Film and Theatre, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
SPACE AS SATIRE IN GRAND THEFT AUTO


The Grand Theft Auto series of video games boasts one of the most fully realized fictional spaces in the medium. Liberty City, Vice City and the state of San Andreas provide players with immersive, convincingly living locales in which to have adventures. The level of detail of these urban landscapes is emphasized by the presence of hidden collectible items, which encourage the players to explore every nook and cranny of these digital spaces. The freedom of action available to the players is one of the reasons why Michael Nitsche argues that “Liberty City is an example of the way in which virtual space offers a genre-defying arena for free play, where Proppian functions can define interactive options but add up to a rich and less-confined possibility space” (54). At the same time, Liberty City and its kin might also be said to offer a genre-defining arena, as the character of the spaces shapes the stories that take place therein. Thus, the almost photorealistic grittiness of the version of Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto IV leads to the darker, Martin Scorsese-influenced crime stories of that game. What is important to remember, though, is that these mediated spaces and their stories have strong links to the actual spaces that have inspired them. Liberty City is very recognizably New York City, Vice City is Miami, and San Andreas is California with Las Vegas thrown in for good measure. There is also a very strong sense of history in the series, and so the 90s-set Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas climaxes with chaos inspired by the Rodney King riots of 1992, while a television documentary in Grand Theft Auto IV details the ghastly founding years of the city, an origin story as humorous and grotesque as it is painfully recognizable. The cities of Grand Theft Auto thus become digital embodiments of satire, enveloping the player in fictional world that subsequently forces the player to reconsider the real world.


The tactic of combining minute, finely observed detail with savage caricature recalls Hogarth. Furthermore, following Alain Badiou, these cities are, thanks to the presence of “intrinsicdeterminations” (304) (defined geography, consistent physical rules) and “networks of relations” (304) (the alliances and antagonisms that animate the cities), worlds just as valid, on their own terms, as the physical one. Fully coming to grips with the satire of these worlds, then, means applying their lessons to our own.


Works Cited
Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
Nitsche, Michael. Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008. Print.


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Aquino, Eduardo
Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Shanski, Karen
Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
SEARCHLIGHT


Empty, abandoned space in which a series of occurrences have taken place seems to subjugate the eye of the urban photographer. Such urban space, which I will denote by the French expression terrain vague, assumes the status of fascination, the most solvent sign with which to indicate what cities are and what our experience of them is. Ignasi de Solà Morales Searchlight is a project proposal for the Atmosphere 2011 symposium on Mediated Cities. A searchlight is a lighting device that uses a bright light source with an optical system constituted by lenses and reflectors to project powerful parallel luminous rays at a long distance. Searchlights were originally conceived for military application in the 1880s, and used throughout the 2nd World War. Today, searchlights are used in advertising, fairs, festivals and other public events. Their use was once common for movie premieres; the waving searchlight beams still can be seen as a design element in the logo of the 20th Century Fox movie studio, and Fox television network. The idea for this project is multifold. First we would select about 10 sites within the inner city limits of Winnipeg and light them with a searchlight in the depth of winter. The chosen sites will be typical of Winnipeg’s perpetual transitional mode—placed in permanent state of suspension. These urban and architectural scenarios would then be carefully photographed and the results exhibited during the Atmosphere symposium. Secondly, we will illuminate one of the selected sites, to be located within the vicinity of the Atmosphere network downtown in the Exchange District, emphasizing a significant architectural object or a particular urban space that otherwise would go unnoticed during the night hours. This site will be strategically selected to be observed from a distance, within the trajectory of the Atmosphere events. We want to produce the images prior to the event, and in this way we would be happy to use this happening to promote the Atmosphere symposium.


Searchlight offsets the original military use of the technology. The intention now is to activate some significant characters of the city through a dramatic and poetic action. The project invests on the deeply atmospheric character of the Winnipeg winter and its terrain vague nature, abstracted by the radical absence of bodies in the city, creating now a cinematic coating on the urbanscape by illuminating the stoic presence of its architecture. The project evokes film noir, where the black & white make-up, added
to its dramatic use of light and low tech approach to film-making usually set in indefinite urban environments.


Searchlight responds to the proposal for Atmosphere [Mediated Cities] through the re-use and imprinting of an old technology on the cityscape, generating a new representation for the city. Searchlight also counterpoints to a more recent local urban account: the Winnipeg police have just purchased a helicopter. In Searchlight the light will be placed in the opposite direction of the police helicopter’s relative point of view, suggesting the possibility of shifting power positions regarding the overriding surveillance apparatus—from the one that surveys to one who is surveyed—making the project a sort of "lost" searchlight, from the ground up instead of from the sky down.


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Austin Smith, Brenda
Department of English, Film and Theatre, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
DIVINE INTERVENTION: “THIRDSPACE” AND THE OCCUPIED CITY


When Michel de Certeau looks down at Manhattan from the privileged position of the urban planner and cartographer, he experiences a rapturous “erotics of knowledge” (92). What he admits a few sentences later though, is that his “exaltation” is “the fiction of knowledge,” for the living city cannot be known from this estranged perspective (92). Far below him are the “ordinary practitioners” of the city who “make use of spaces that cannot be seen” (93). These inhabitants write a city that cannot be read, what de Certeau calls “a migrational or metaphorical city” that counters the intentions and desires of the urban planner to know, and to determine the uses of, city space.


The “strategies” and “tactics” de Certeau refers to in describing the unconscious opposition between planners and users of the city become re-militarized in Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention (2002). The cartographer’s knowledge serves not only the city planner, but also the military strategist whose relation to city spaces is similarly distanced and intentional. Urban military occupations, not unlike urban renewal projects, re-direct the life of the city through travel restrictions and curfews. The presence of headquarters and checkpoints provides a vantage from which panoptical knowledge can be secured, enforced, and of course, resisted by those who know the city differently.


In this paper I describe the spatial practices on view in this film and argue that what Edward Soja calls “thirdspace” can be sensed in the absurdity of its humor. Thirdspace, in Soja’s work, is a hybrid creation of the relations between space and people. Based in part on Henri Lefebrvre’s trialectic of perceived (physical), conceived (imaginary) and lived (experienced) space, thirdspace combines both physical and mental space, but poses an alternative to them that incorporates and transcends both.


The edgy, gallows humour of Divine Intervention gives the idea of thirdspace filmic incarnation as both a physical and conceptual effect, a visual and auditory figure of space produced by the politically charged relationships from which it arises. The film’s formal discontinuity, its reliance on deadpan and muteness, its ironic and bold rendering of fantasy act against any easy understanding of thirdspace as a bland synthesis of opposing ideologies. The thirdspace of humour in Suleiman’s film is a plan for an unmappable city that thwarts all efforts to know it completely.


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Bard, Perry
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA: THE GLOBAL REMAKE


Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, upload them to dziga.perrybard.net where software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film. As people can upload the same shot more than once infinite versions of the film are possible. The site contains a scene index, shot list and tags allowing viewers to navigate the site in different ways.
There is also a link to the original Vertov film. When users select a shot to upload, instructions appear to walk them through the process. It is asked that people respect the rhythm of Vertov’s original: each shot is logged indicating the duration of the shot. If someone were to upload four minutes rather than four seconds the software would adjust the upload to Vertov’s duration. Once a shot is uploaded it is cued for approval and once approved it becomes part of the stream. The software builds a new film each day reflecting the most recent uploads. The versions of the film alternate when it is screened. A high resolution daily download file is available for projection. It is usually shown as an installation with projection and website on a computer.


The work explores the capabilities of the internet to achieve global collaboration by encouraging culturally diverse participation and by developing software which accepts input from many sources (e.g. mobile phone, digital still camera, video, screen‐grab. To ensure that uploads would not be from the usual places I commissioned 12 foreign correspondents (Brazil, Lebanon, Israel, Columbia, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Japan, China, Korea, Mexico, Thailand) whose role is to spread the word through their mailing lists and to organize the upload of scenes or shots that add up to a minimum of one minute in length. To further participation I have also done workshops/presentations in New York, Middletown CT, Manchester UK, Sheffield UK, Tokyo, Beijing, Berlin, Amsterdam, Bogotå, Montreal, Singapore, Split with two upcoming in Jerusalem and in Ljublana.


In creating the database version Vertov’s experiment enters the 21st century. Its original form and content pose interesting questions about the nature of documentary that are still relevant almost a century later. It is hoped the project will serve as a plagorm for discussion raising issues about internet communities, participatory practices, the future of film ‐ about media and media‐making both on and offline.


http://www.perrybard.net
http://dziga.perrybard.net


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Bashara, Daniel
School of Communication, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
UNLIMITED ANIMATION: ARCHITECTURAL SPACE AND THE POSTWAR AMERICAN CARTOON


In 1951, the UPA animation studio released GERALD McBOING BOING, a cartoon
about a boy whose speech emerges as sound effects instead of words, with unfortunate and amusing consequences. Drawn in an abstract modern style, with clean lines, bright color fields, and minimalist geometric and organic shapes, GERALD belongs to the explosion of modern design in the postwar American consumer market, and its formal innovation set the tone for American animation for decades to follow. To use design historian George Marcus’s phrase, when “everyone went modern,” many cartoons did too.


However, GERALD is more than merely an example of a trend in American consumer culture. Through a case study of this cartoon’s visual strategies, this paper aims to situate the changing styles of postwar American animation amongst concurrent developments in architecture and design, focusing on the writings of European émigrés György Kepes, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Sigfried Giedion. Their common concern for the rehabilitation of the “whole man” required a remaking of vision and spatial experience in a new postwar modernity, one that would equip humankind with the sensory machinery to experience daily life more fully. Modernist architecture’s approach to this perceptual revolution—reduction to line and shape, interpenetration of inside and outside, structural minimalism to circulate light and air—find fulfillment in GERALD’s flat planes, transparent figures, and invisible architecture, just as Gerald fulfills the modernists’ central problematic of a modern individual split between internal thought and external expression.


I contend that GERALD is in dialogue with the design experiments of the American Bauhaus, negotiating the very problems of vision that were central to the postwar modern architecture boom in America. At stake is a reimagination of postwar American modernism as more than a period style copying more serious artistic experimentation, or a consumer phenomenon occurring alongside the work of the high modernists; rather, as GERALD McBOING BOING shows, cartoonists, designers, and architects were working together with the same raw materials—vision and space—to fashion a new way to experience a new modern world. In examining cartoons, design, and architecture as part of a single project, I propose a new understanding of postwar “limited animation” in opposition to its current definition as animation that lacks full movement. Rather, I view it as an engagement with modernist concepts of architectural space—George Howe’s “flowing space,” Walter Gropius’s “space in motion,” Giedion’s “space-emanating volumes”—that are themselves concerned with animation. Mid- century innovations in cartoons speak to modern architecture’s own attempts to animate the space in and around its constructions, and in turning away from the Disney-style pursuit of flesh-and- blood naturalist animation, I argue, UPA and the studios that followed their lead introduced a form of animation that might be called architectural.


Bibliography
Amidi, Amid. Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2006.
Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th Revised Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Gropius, Walter. Scope of Total Architecture. New York: Harper, 1955.
Howe, George. “Flowing Space: The Concept of Our Time,” in Building for Modern Man: A Symposium, ed. Thomas H. Creighton, 164-169. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Hubley, John & Zachary Schwartz. “Animation Learns a New Language,” Hollywood Quarterly 1.4 (Jul 1946): 360-363.
Kepes, György. Language of Vision. Chicago: Theobald, 1944.
Moholy-Nagy, László. Vision in Motion. Chicago: Theobald, 1947.


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Bird, Lawrence
Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
BEYOND THE DESERT OF THE REAL: REGENERATIVE NARRATIVES IN THE CITYSCAPE


Beyond the Desert of the Real: Regenerative Narratives in the Cityscape gleans stories from the city of Winnipeg, from students of architecture and recent newcomers (sometimes both at the same time). Participants use video to document parts of the city that draw their concern, and weave those moving images into narratives. Narrative is defined loosely; oblique or elliptical tales and tellings are encouraged. This project reacts to Beaudrillard’s notion of “the Desert of the Real”, a term he gave to those wastelands thrown up in the wake of North American simulacral culture. While viewing parts of Winnipeg as just such a desert, this project stands in opposition to Beaudrillard: media and mediatized tales are seen as part of the solution, not just part of the problem.


Rather than merely commenting on the condition of the city, the project intends to act upon it through urban design proposals and through media interventions in public space. The latter phase of the project proposes such an intervention: a projection in public space.
At one level, this projection will simply create a space where the stories can be seen and the storytellers’ voices can be heard. But just as importantly, it will explore the overlaying or interpenetration of urban image and the materiality of the city: walls, pavements, windows. The city is conceived as itself a screen, a screen with a wide range of opacities, transparencies, and textures. The composition of the projection will be site-specific. It will make use of the material qualities of the site/screen, exploiting them to communicate the content of the narratives, but also adapting to the site/screen to bring out its liminal qualities (for example, choreographing the play of light and image over its textures and materials).


The most likely option for composing the projection will be the software Quartz Composer, which allows the interactive superimposition and manipulation of moving and still images and text (the stories will likely require subtitles). The composition will aim to articulate the condition of multiple and fragmented viewpoints, and a narrative form which engages us while denying a single, straightforward reading.


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Boumeester, Marc
School of Design and Media Sciences, University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, Delft, The Netherlands
CITY AND THE AGENCY OF MOVING IMAGE APRÈS DEBORD


Starting early in this millennium, a long term research and educational programme was set up by the Delft School of Design, faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, to investigate if and how videography could play an additional role in the exploration and understanding of urban environments. This programme, in which intensive self-evolving experimental projects have been undertaken to test various Cinematic Mapping techniques, clarified how to apply moving images in urban mapping and shows why it is helpful to start with the notion of 'collected subjectivity' as a guideline in this quest. The trajectory which has been created by the research meanders through in-between stages like structuring, gridding, zoning, collecting and sensing in cinematic mapping.


Put in line (or in contrast) with techniques such as the dérive, we could categorize methodologies which have been developed and used by film-makers in the decades 'after Guy Debord' and see how they deployed their aspirations to map socio-spatial-cultural-economic conditions in modern urban settings with the use of moving imagery. Debord's refusal to produce new imagery was solely directed towards avoiding the commodifying effect of the production itself. His attacks on the Agency of Moving Image demanded a high level of understanding of the medium and his wish to avoid any of the classical forms of aesthetics and narratives was purely strategic. Put in the temporal context it is impossible not to recognize the fact that the production and distribution of audio-visual media was largely controlled by a structure of capitalist organizations, in which the individual - as audience or potential producer - had no significant leverage to communicate any self-made subjective reflection or original notion. Therefore any participation in this system automatically implied to strengthen it.


Now, in a time when the usage and distribution of media is almost completely democratized, there seem to be not many justifiable arguments left not to utilize moving imagery directly as an instrument for the exploration and socio-political revaluation of urban conditions. And in any case we could question if the strategy chosen by Debord was the only possible one.


Based on the results of the programme, new outlines for future research have been drawn in which the use of moving image in connection to the problematique of mapping plays a central role. For this the level is re-entered where the notions of what is happening 'in the screen' and that of what is happening 'on the screen' not only distinct the different approaches towards the theme, but also show overlap and thus form a connecting element in which production and representation could appear simultaneously. In this state one could argue that the continuous shaping and reshaping of the mental models involved in the perception and creation of such circumstances, affect the socio-economic paradigm shifts which underlie changes in our urban settings. Characteristics of the Agency of Moving Image like the fragmentation of Time, fragmentation of Space and fragmentation of Memory will be monitored and assessed on their ability to contribute in shaping a form of 'projective mapping' in addition to all other forms of intentional mapping.


References (indicative)
Baichwal, Jennifer (2006), Manufactured Landscapes, New York,: Zeitgeist Films.
Barthes, Roland (1993), Camera Lucida, London: Vintage
Brakhage, Stan (2003), by Brakhage: an anthology, New York: The Criterion Collection.
Bruno, Giuliana (2002), Atlas of emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, New York: Verso.
Carroll, Noël (1988), Philosophical problems of classical film theory, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Carroll, Noël (2008), The philosophy of motion pictures, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Clarke, Alan (1989), Elephant, Belfast: BBC Northern Ireland.
Debord, Guy (1994), The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone books.
Debord, Guy (1952), Hurlements en Faveur de Sade
Debord,Guy (1961), Critique de la séparation
Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2 , London: Continuum.
Eisenstein, Sergei (1957), Film Form, New York: Meridian Books.
Graafland, Arie (2000), The Socius of Architecture, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.
Graafland, Arie (2008), Understanding the Socius through creative mapping techniques, Delft: Delft School of Design.
Halbwachs, Maurice (1992), On Collective Memory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hauptmann, Deborah (Ed.)(2006), The Body in Architecture, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.
Hitchcock, Alfred (1954), Rear Window, Universal: Universal City CA.
Hoskins, Andrew (2003), An Introduction to Media and Collective Memory, Swansea: Dept. Of Media and Communication Studies.
Keiller, Patrick (1994), London, London: British Film Institute.
Kourany, J.A. (Ed.). (1987). Scientific Knowledge: Basic issues in the philosophy of science. Bolmont: Wadsworth.
Marker, Chris (1962), La Jetée, Neuilly-sur-Seine: Argos Films.
Marker, Chris (1983), Sans Soleil, Neuilly-sur-Seine: Argos Films.
Noé, Gaspar (2002), Irréversible, Paris: Wild Bunch.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2001), The architecture of image, Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy.
Sokurov, Alexander (2002), Russian Arc, St.Petersburg: The State Hermitage Museum.
Raban, Jonathan (1988), Soft City, London: HarperCollins Publishers.
Rancière, Jacques (2009), The future of image, London/New York: Verso.
Resnais, Alain (1960), L'Année dernière à Marienbad, Neuilly-sur-Seine: Argos Films.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1996), Helicopter String Quartet, Amsterdam: Allegri Film.
Van Sant, Gus (2003), Elephant, Santa Monica: HBO Films.
Von Trier, Lars (2003), The five obstructions, Hvidovre: Zentropa.


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Bourbonnais, Julie, Lucie Paquet and Jonathan Yu
Montréal, Quebéc
138 VS 1: DOCUMENTATION OF NORDICITY : A COMPARATIVE LOOK AT ROUTE 138 IN QUÉBEC AND ROUTE 1 IN ICELAND

Route 138 is a straight line from a metropolis to the end of settlements. Route 1, the Ring Road, encircles a huge area characterized by volcanic no man's lands. Both of them thread between immense empty spaces and vast water surfaces. From these geographical particularities combined to the needs of industrial development, emerges a spontaneous system, where inhabitants structure their lives strictly along the road.

The project's intention is to build an objective compendium of architectural manifestations which occur along both roads. In order to highlight their formal and aesthetic differences, these edifices and shapes will then be subdivided into categories according to functions, idiosyncrasies and chromatic similarities. The database is composed not only of photos but also sound and video which were created on location in Iceland and Québec during the course of 2009 and 2010. The chosen locations were documented as well as objects and as context and spaces in between. All the media accumulated as been catalogued and sorted according to a series of pre-established rules, in order to then be associated to labels which inter-connects with other medias. From this structured collection of data, the resultant documentation will be made available on the web with the intention of allowing users to create a novel narrative through the indeterminate navigation through the database by a series of subjective links.

For Mediated Cities 2011, we propose to use the database as the foundation from which to create novel interpretations of research results. The intention here is to re-contextualize the collected compendium as mediated content whose form constitutes a communicative act between two disparate locations. In the act of binding these actual landscapes together we synthesize an imagined one from subjective resonances and dissonances. We propose to present the completed website as a starting point for an iterative series of multi-media works which express the potential hybrid relations to Route 138 and Route 1 from a mediated third location. The installation would comprise of selected and remixed video, sound installations, and photographic works, that freely incorporate both materials gathered from the 138 and 1 as singular expressions. Furthermore, we would ideally like to incorporate these forms as site specific gestures outside of any gallery setting and thus allow for an additional layer of re-evaluation based on context. The specific locations of which are currently being researched.


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Bourbonnais, Julie, Lucie Paquet and Jonathan Yu
Montréal, Quebéc
DRIVE-THRU

An expressive tangent of the 138vs1 project; this mobile installation invites the visitor to re-imagine passages through lands foreign and familiar. Through incorporating re-constituted recordings of the traverse along routes 138 in Québec, and the no. 1 in Iceland, passing imagery and scattered memories are woven into a continuous narrative of the back-seat dreamer's making. 


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Calder, David
School of Communication, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
ACTIVIST ARCHAEOLOGY: MEMORIES OF DEINDUSTRIALIZATION IN KOMPLEXKAPHARNAÜM’S PLAYREC


From 2006 to 2008, French street theatre company KompleXKapharnaüM toured industrial and deindustrializing cities throughout Europe with their site-specific performance PlayRec (a title derived from the “play” and “record” buttons on a video or voice recorder). At each stop on their tour, the theatre company sought out an abandoned factory that typified the area’s local industrial heritage. They researched the documented history of the site and its demise but also conducted interviews with former factory workers. These videotaped oral histories were then projected onto the factory building’s walls as part of what the company dubbed a “Fresco-Manifesto.” Over and around these projections, KompleXKapharnaüM’s multi-disciplinary artists performed acrobatic feats on the factory walls, improvised music to accompany machine noises, and staged industrial archaeological excavations in which performers unearthed artifacts from the factory’s history. PlayRec’s press packet states, “KompleXKapharnaüM operate like 21st century archaeologists, gleaning traces, collecting fragments related to the memory of a city and its inhabitants. […] The high point of the performance is the creation of a huge wall painting on the site itself. Scraps of memory are pasted together […] A version of history which disregards the “grand narrative” to focus on the wealth of individual recollections. The mural is a manifesto, written into the living walls of the city” (KompleXKapharnaüM).


A manifesto is a text, but it is also a demonstration and a performative act. Manifestos do not describe movements; they initiate them. Combining image and text with the materiality of built structures and acrobatic bodies, PlayRec challenges the static, documentary function of workers’ oral histories, transforming them into a manifesto. Remnants and traces of the past become initiators of an alternate future.


As the performance’s title indicates, playing and recording have become inextricably linked. But what movement does the Fresco-Manifesto call into being? Drawing on interviews with the company, documented performances, press materials, and recent work in performance, architectural, and urban memory studies, I will argue thatKompleXKapharnaüM’s multimedia PlayRec performances invite a rethinking of urban space as both montage and palimpsest. The montage highlights the interstitial spaces separating chains of images, denaturalizing a relation or progression through stark juxtaposition. The palimpsest implies erasures and illegibilities, the kinds of conflicts that define the social history of an urban text. PlayRec denaturalizes the twin phenomena of deindustrialization and urban redevelopment and, in doing so, invites its audiences to remake the city otherwise.


Work Cited
KompleXKapharnaüM. PlayRec. Press packet. English version. Available as downloadable PDF from http://www.komplex-kapharnaum.net/.


Key Bibliographic References
Borden, Iain, Joe Kerr, and Jane Rendell, eds. The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Boyer, M. Christine. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Crinson, Mark, and Paul Tyrer. "Clocking Off in Ancoats: Time and Remembrance in the Post-Industrial City." In Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, edited by Mark Crinson, 49-74. New York: Routledge, 2005.
———. "Totemic Park: Symbolic Representation in Post-Industrial Space." In Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, edited by Mark Crinson, 99- 120. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Edensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality. London: Berg, 2005.
Harris, Sue. "'Dancing in the Streets': The Aurillac Festival of Street Theatre." Contemporary Theatre Review 14, no. 2 (2004): 57-71.
Harvie, Jen. Theatre & the City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
High, Steven, and David W. Lewis. Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization. Ithaca: ILR Press, 2007.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Jordan, Jennifer A. Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin andBeyond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Kwon, Miwon. "From Site to Community in New Genre Public Art: The Case of 'Culturein Action'." In One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, 100-37. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks. Theatre/Archaeology. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Williams, Richard. "Remembering, Forgetting and the Industrial Gallery Space." In
Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, edited by Mark Crinson, 121-44. New York: Routledge, 2005.


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Crow, Jason
School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec
MEDITATIONS ON A SNOWBALL FIGHT


Around one a.m. on December 20, 2009, a snowball fight erupted in New York City's Times Square. A single tweet about the event resulted in a storm of online commentary. One commentator noted with awe that due to the snowball fight, New York had become a new city. The event captured a shared imaginative transformation of the city. The new New York helps us understand the potential poetics of our dwelling within a digitally mediated fiction.


Unfortunately, contrary to the fiction of the digital in the New York of the snowball fight, ubiquitous computing is too often conflated with reality. If the digital is assumed to model reality, it can offer nothing new to our interpretation of the city which it overlays. The collapse of the real with the digital thus hinders our capacity to truly dwell in our cities differently. How can we understand the digital as a promise of poetic interpretation instead of as a mediated reality?


Wolfgang Iser responds to a similar question about reality in his discussion of the category of the fictive, which critically situates it between the real and imaginary. For Iser, the fictive opens the experience given by the text. He argues that it is the fiction of the text that charts new worlds beyond familiarity. Intriguingly, his understanding of the fictive is founded upon an architectural act engaged in play. Within the context of Iser’s discussion of the fictive, digital mediation might be better understood as offering fictions to make our city new rather than as a means to map reality.


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Doz, Daniel
Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary
THE CITY AT NIGHT | a topological cinematic labyrinth


As with Daedalus' labyrinth, the cinematic city is often depicted as an environment from which one can escape only at great cost. The journey (or quest) can lead the main character(s) to its center or to its periphery in what could resemble salvation. This presentation proposes to examine the topology that drives this duality of representations.


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El-Hadi, Nehal
Program in Planning, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario
READING URBAN SPACE AS HYPERTEXT: NAVIGATING DUNDAS SQUARE


“[T]he text must be able, from the sociological as well as the psychological point of view, to “decontextualize” itself in such a way that it can be “recontextualized” in a new situation—as accomplished, precisely, by the act of reading” (Ricoeur, 1991).


By engaging hypertext as an analogy for producing and experiencing urban space, especially as the experience of the Internet has altered how we interact with and read our physical environments, planners can appreciate the production of urban spaces from a different perspective shaped by how we navigate through these everyday spaces. By illustrating the similarities between navigating hypertext and experiencing urban space and applying a (hyper)textual analysis to Toronto’s Dundas Square, I hope to demonstrate the usefulness of such an approach for those engaged in the planning and development of everyday urban spaces.


Google Street View™ provides a different means of experiencing urban space, a disembodied perambulation through a physical, tangible place. Preserved visually, the brain fills in the sounds and smells it knows to be there from previous visits. It’s a strange, and sometimes disorienting movement, through time and space, restricted by the very limited means of navigating through an everyday space. Street View, however, is a synchronous marriage between hypertext and the urban, a meeting of technology and space, replete with the possibilities and limitations provided by both.


With this paper, I intend to present reading hypertext as an analogy for moving through urban spaces, and to demonstrate how the planning profession can appreciate the production, design and management of urban spaces from a different perspective shaped by how we navigate through everyday spaces, physically and virtually.


References
Amin, A. and Thrift, N. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Dieberger A., and Tromp J.G.: "The Information City - A Metaphor for Navigating
Hypertexts", research paper at the HCI93.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1974. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article. New German Critique,
3:49-55.
Joyce, Michael. 1995. Of Two Minds: Hypertext pedagogy and poetics. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Mandelbaum, Seymour J. 2003. “Narrative and Other Tools.” In Story and Sustainability:
Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities, Ed. Barbara Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton. Boston: MIT Press.
Morgan, Wendy and Andrews, Richard. 1999. “Cities of Text? Metaphors for hypertext in
literary education”. Changing English, 6(1). Pp. 81-92.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation.” In From Text to Social Action, Essays in Hermeneutics II. Chicago: Northwestern University.
Rieff, Janice L. 2006 “Urban Web: Cities as Hypertext” from the Pauley Symposium at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Shum, Simon. 1990. “Real and Virtual Spaces: Mapping from Spatial Cognition to
Hypertext.” Hypermedia, 2(2). Pp. 133-158.
Smith, Christopher. (2004). "'Whose Streets?': Urban Social Movements and the Politicization of Space," Public, 29. Pp. 156-67.
Throgmorton, J.A. 2003. “Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in a Global-Scale Web of
Relationships.” Planning Theory, 2(2). Pp. 125-181.
Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14(1). Pp. 49–90.


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Ginckels, Peterjan
Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Ghent, Belgium
SPEED LAB. A TACTICAL EXPLORATION OF THE IMAGE


The method I continuously develop to run an up to date practice raising up to date questions and creating productive, generative objects and scenarios.


I will present a series of 3 executed projects of Speedism. These projects focus on the Chinese urban environment and on the fantasy which fuels the realization of what might be called the 'Chinese dream'. In Beijing and Shanghai we started the visual research project resulting in Doomdough (project 1), which we consecutively represented and remixed in two sequel projects, 'Happy Consensus Land' and 'Iahgnahs Onhcet'. The transformations that took place by rebuilding the project touch on currents in re- and pre-presentation of cities, real and fictional (see explanation of Iahgnahs Onhcet).


The techniques and studio conceptions I apply teaching at architecture school to further refine the academic framework of this investigation. The experiment with software and performance to produce new ideas during (re)presentations of projects.


This framework is illustrated by the three former projects and a manifest, and I will present how the methods of our studio production are further explored in an educational environment, technically and tactically.


I can conclude that current practice takes place in a mediated world, by mediated and compiled individuals, and this practice demands for specific ways of working in which image-based design and practice-based research and their representation cluster together in very powerful ways.


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Gladdys, Katerie
Digital Media Department, University of Florida, Gainsville, Florida
STROLLER FLÂNEUR


I push my son in a stroller through the neighborhood. Wandering with no agenda other than outside time with my child, I reflect upon this locomotion that constitutes the most public and stereotyped activities of motherhood. The pace of the walk forces me to notice the minutiae of suburbia examining the environment for patterns and narratives. Semi-tropical Florida, Home Depot domesticity, traces of the historic, but little known Liberty Hill African-American community, the current recession, and the omnipresent desperate drone of condominium construction collide in the geography that constitutes my local. I attempt to discern the genealogy of architectural structures and topographies visually leafing through the layers of additions, subtractions, road surfaces and plantings. Simultaneously, I search for items of possible interest to my son—animals, vehicles and lawn decorations. With the advent of intelligible speech, he, too, participates in this free association. A dialectic emerges between me, my son, and my surroundings that recalls my own history.


The methodology that informs this piece is a gendered rift on the practice of the flâneur where the necessity of childcare is the platform for textualizing suburban space. My version of flânerie is a spatial practice (ala deCerteau) of my neighborhood and the surrounding environs.


The performance of strolling a child is indeed one of the social processes of inhabiting and appropriating the public spaces of the suburbs as well as the city. The path that I take through this space of my neighborhood is variable, the route determined by season, weather, time, and mood, stops occurring for snacks and the occasional diaper change. “What better way to reassure oneself, to remap the local, than to tour its transformed streets? …The gaze of the flâneur is thus part of a tactic to appropriate not only the local, physical spaces of the city as one's own ‘turf’, but to participate in the popular sense of empire and to master even revel in the ‘emporium’ [Substitute suburbia for emporium.]” (Shields, 1994, p. 74).


The physical manifestation of the piece, Stroller Flâneur, is a series of videos of me pushing my son in a stroller around the neighborhood. Taking structural cues from Benjamin’s Arcade Project, I document my experience of walking, looking and researching this place by collecting the multi-faceted, often conflicting signifiers of familiar suburbia to create a fractured even strange landscape. Several layers of audio and video are composited forming strata of imagery—my child in the stroller, the neighborhood, virtual Google representations of the neighborhood, aerial photography, property tax assessment maps, my voice, ambient noise. My visual and aural observations periodically interrupt and focus the viewers’ attention on particular aspects of the landscape with the intention to create polymorphic narratives. Flânerie is a call to participate, to play. It does not strive for accuracy, but asks those who to read its products according to Hessel to "go yourself just like me without destination on the small journeys of discovery of the fortuitous” (as cited in Frisby, 1994, p. 96).


References
Benjamin, W. (2002). The arcades project. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress.
De Certeau, M. (2002). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Frisby, D. (1994). The flâneur in social theory. In K. Tester (Ed.), The Flâneur
(pp. 81-110). London, England: Routledge.
Morawski, S. (1994). The hopeless game of flânerie. In K. Tester (Ed.), The Flâneur
(pp. 181-197). London, England: Routledge.
Shields, R. (1994). Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie. In K. Tester
(Ed.), The Flâneur (pp. 81-110). London, England: Routledge.


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Gladdys, Katerie
Digital Media Department, University of Florida, Gainsville, Florida
THY NEIGHBOR’S FRUIT


I am always amazed by the pervasive use of tropical fruit trees as ornament rather than nutrition. Piles of citrus and loquats sit uneaten beneath trees in the ubiquitous subdivisions that characterize the landscape. The fruit trees that dot people’s yards become a potential resource for nutrition. I think about what can be done with fruit and imagine systems of distribution that could serve as metaphors to create community from a marginalized and unused resource.


This project explores the act an exchange--asking for something that is free requiring no effort on the part of the owner other than access to their personal space, transforming the fruit into jam (product) and finally returning the fruit not only to the owner of the tree, but to other neighbors who own fruit trees in the form of jars of jam. My research consists of walking and driving through the neighborhoods around my home and mapping the location of loquat trees and citrus. I ask permission of the people who live at each location to pick their fruit, collecting not only fruit, but recording narratives about their relationship to their trees, perspectives on giving, ownership, and the potential transformation of space that could occur when a resource is shared.


The methodology that informs this piece explores and textualizes suburban space in terms of the production of food examining what constitutes decoration and utility in the ordinary landscape. This research serves to perhaps highlight the commodity/currency found in one’s outdoor environment and how the sharing of that resource could create alternative awareness of community. The organization of these landscapes seen as atypical with respect to providing food revisits the idea of local vis a vis “homegrown” food. The project is a qualitative, poetic interpretation of social/environmental research and fieldwork.


The physical manifestation of the piece is a video/physical installation. The participant accompanies me on the search for fruit, listening to the stories that result from my interactions with owners of fruit trees and apprehending the physical environment through video, still image, and preserved citrus and loquats. Thus far I have presented the piece as a small study and in a museum setting. The piece is site specific both in terms of formal presentation and content. If possible, I would like to create an intimate piece where the video or even just audio is experienced via portable DVD players or a series of micro projections in a storage area or a large storefront/public window. Depending on season and availability, fruit and stories from the gallery’s neighborhood potentially could become part of the piece extending and reflecting upon the notion of neighbor.


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Harrop, Patrick
Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba
Madan, Emmanuel
[The User], Montréal
Miyazaki, Shintaro
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
The Inductive City


Concurrent with the Atmosphere Symposium, Inductive City is an electronic / sound workshop to be held at the
CAST research unit on the 4th and 5th of February. This workshop will be based on the work of two sound / interactive artists: Shintaro Miyazaki of Detektors, based in Berlin, and Emmanual Madan of [The User], based in Montreal. We will be welcoming the participation of musicians, artists, academics and students. The workshop will be focused on the sonification of electromagnetic induction that is found in the airwaves and atmosphere in our cities as well as through grounding effects found in materials.

We will be working with "detector" circuits designed for receiving electromagnetic signals generated from a multitude of sources including bluetooth, electrical transmissions and radio waves, invisible to the eye but made present by the detectors. Participants will use these amplifiers to conduct mapping and field recordings exercises across Winnipeg during the weekend. The results will be broadcast and posted to the Detektors website as well as presented at the final session of the conference. Detektors has had an impressive international reputation building in the sound art community through venues such as transmediale (Berlin), ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Arts) and many internationally recognized sound art festivals.

As well, Emmanual Madan will be using this workshop to develop and refine a new sonic/interactive piece based on induction and grounding effect through amplified signals modulated by body contact with conductive materials. The User has had a remarkable presence in the interactive and sound art scene internationally and are best know for their pieces: Silophone, Symphony for Dot - Matrix Printer and more recently their installation coincidence engines which was nominated for last year's transmediale prize. They have performed / installed at Ars Electronica (Linz), MUTEK (Montreal) as well as the ICA institute for contemporary art (London).


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  Holmquist, Paul
School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec
Crow, Jason
School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec
INTO THE MXT


Recently, the end of Professor Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s research project AutoCAD Ballet, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, was celebrated with the creation and staging of the ephemeral architecture project, MXT. As an event, MXT comprised an immersive environment in which media, objects, performance, and architectural fabrication heightened sensual experience and sought to enable a participatory imaginative experience of the city of Montréal. The staging of MXT asked how architecture mediated by the digital serves to open up the communicative space of participation recognized as the essential condition of the city. The traditional role of architecture was to mediate through a poetic making that provided the place in which a community could form and find orientation within a cosmological framework. The positivist reduction emblematized by progressive technologies played a major role in fragmenting community by destroying the possibility of sharing a cosmology. Given the permeation of such instrumental uses of technology in the conception of our contemporary cities, MXT asked if the traditional mediating role continues to be possible in architecture today. Can digital technologies and new media play a part in the architecture of the city? Taking cues from historical festival architectural, the erotic nature of architectural experience as set out in Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499, and Hans Georg Gadamer's discussion of play and festival time, the MXT event pointed toward new ways of understanding the play of the digital in our conception of the city. Through the production and staging of the ephemeral architecture of MXT, a new image of festival architecture emerged as a responsiveness to play and being played that brings participants together as a community and reveals new possibilities for digitally mediated architecture in shared experiences of the city.


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Hsu, Frances
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia
CCTV


This paper addresses the role and use of media in the architecture of the contemporary city through an examination of the controversial, recently completed headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) by Rem Koolhaas/OMA. OMA conceived their design to not only respond to the ideology of the Communist Party with an affirmative icon but also critique the nature and limits of the modern media institution. I will analyze these contradictory aspects of the design-- the conception of architecture as image and the scripting of physical movement through the manipulation of program--in order to expose the "invisible mask" of control, the political nature of architecture rooted in enclosure and the manner in which enclosure is perceived.1


A comparison to Delirious New York (1978, rpt. 1994) explains the notion, driving the CCTV design, of urban space as a palimpsest of memory and mediation. Koolhaas, former journalist and scriptwriter, depicts Manhattan as kind of automatic writing, collectively constructed by architects, artists, developers, visionaries, philosophers, and journalists, through drawings, photography, postcards, words, and films made possible by technology in the age of arts' mechanical reproduction. The re-presentation of the history of Manhattan as a collage of fictions was a literary and artistic device used to open the past to the present and anticipate the future.


CCTV was part of Koolhaas's agenda to "go east," post 9-11, when he turned his back on America to declare Manhattan “delirious no more."2 Yet if Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and Downtown Athletic Club were utopian fragments, "apparatuses for reinventing city life that create both a density that astronomically expands the repertoire of programs, events, and overlappings and a smoothness that urban life has never before known," then the aim of CCTV-- “to offer an alternative to the exhausted typology of the skyscraper ... to incubate new cultures, programs, and ways of life [rather than] merely routine activity, arranged according to predictable patterns”--seems to augur a return to Koolhaas's early work.3


Today, as technologies continue to evolve, spatial memory and media increasingly coincide. In a late capitalist economy of signs and space, as boundaries of fact and fiction become evermore blurred, relationships between objects and events are not straightforwardly diachronic but rather based on individual or social memory and expectation.4 CCTV is quite literally the space of media and representation. The locus of Chinese media production that is itself a media construct (like the Eiffel Tower both a structure and a system of signification, a lookout and an object to be viewed) seeks to become a seamless, naturalized part of the urban landscape.5 In this context, Delirious New York's rhetorical and visual tactics taken from art and language extend the relevance of the postmodern moment for the city. Koolhaas's notion of Bigness has emerged to become a reality--from Radio City Music Hall to CCTV, from 1939 Worlds Fair to 2008 Beijing Olympics--what he deemed to be “unspeakable” in the first half of the 20th century has become ubiquitous at the start of the 21st.


1 Andrea Kahn, "The Invisible Mask," in Andrea Kahn (ed.) Drawing, Building Text: Essays in
Architectural Theory (Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), pp. 85-106.
2 See Rem Koolhaas, Content (Taschen, 2004)
3 Rem Koolhaas, “Delirious No More, Waning Space: I _ NY,” in Wired, Issue 11.06, June 2003;
and oma.nl
4 Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (Sage Publications, 1994). For Lash
and Urry, globalization has commodified signs, information, symbols, and desires with requisite
consequences.
5 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (Hill and Wang, 1972)


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Huber, Nicole
Department of Architecture, College of Built Environments, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
MEDIATED ATMOSPHERES: THE CINEMATIC CITY AS ENVIRONMENTAL CRITIQUE


Since the 1960s, the relation between the cinema and the city has been integrated into the education and practice of urban design. The "cinematic" conceptualizations of urban space presented in Kevin Lynch’s seminal The Image of the City (1960) and particularly the co-authored The View from the Road (1964) were fundamental contributions to postwar developments in urban theory and design, namely for "postmodern" (Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour 1972), "landscape" (Sieverts 2003), and "cybernetic" (Boyer 1996, 2005) urbanisms. Lynch��s mediated concept of the city was based on cooperations with György Kepes, head of the Light and Color Department at the New Bauhaus and then of Visual Design at MIT. Kepes had developed a cinematic Language of Vision (1944, 1956) based on the principles of Gestalt theory, the perceptual formation of universals, and on cybernetics, the regulation, control and the processing of information in technical and organic systems. Recently, Kepes’ concept of a mediated vision has been described as characteristic of the collaborations of the postwar American industrial-military complex, "the imbrications of government, academia, corporations and mass media that sought, through the extension and integration of networked systems, unbounded modes of control" (Colman 2010, Martin 2003). This paper will complement this perspective by illuminating the ways in which Kepes’ concept not only served governmental and corporate structures but also their critique. It will analyze his concept of a cinematic city as resulting from a heightened ecological consciousness of the relation between vision and value (Kepes 1965-1972), the relation between “vision and an evaluation” informed less by economic or political considerations then by ‘ecological ethics.’ Providing new opportunities of ‘inter-thinking’ and ‘inter-seeing,’ media allowed developing the balance that ‘modern man’ needed to establish with his environment, a perspective informing environmental approaches to design developed by architects and designers such as Philip Thiel (1996), Edward Tufte (2003), and Bruce Mau (Mau, Leonard 2004).




Bibliography:
Appleyard, Donald, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer. The View from the Road. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1964.
Boyer, Christine. 1996. CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication. New York (NY): Princeton Architectural Press.
––––––. 2005. "Playing with information." In: Stephen, Jürgen Rosemann, and Job van Eldijk (eds.), Future City. London (UK): Routledge.
Colman, Scott. 2010. "Float on: A Succession of Progressive Architectural Ecologies." In: Lisa Tilder, Beth Blostein, Jane Amidon (eds.), Design Ecologies: Essays on the Nature of Design. New York (NY): Princeton Architectural Press.
Kepes, György. 1944. Language of Vision. Chicago: Paul Theobald.
––––––. 1956. The New Landscape in Art and Science. Chicago: P. Theobald.
––––––. 1965-1972. Vision and Value Series. New York: George Braziller.
Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge (Mass): M.I.T. Press.
Martin, Reinhold. 2003. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge (Mass): MIT Press.
Mau, Bruce, and Jennifer Leonard. 2004. Massive Change. London (UK): Phaïdon.
Thiel, Philip. 1996. People, Paths, and Purposes: Notations for a Participatory Envirotecture. Seattle (Wa): University of Washington Press.
Tufte, Edward. 2003. "Techniques of environmental political action in small towns." In: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000qW.
Venturi, Robert, Denise S. Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1972. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge (Mass): MIT Press.
Sieverts, Thomas. 2003. Cities without cities: an interpretation of the "Zwischenstadt". London (UK): Routledge.


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Knudtson, Rori
College of Arts and Media, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado
Langhorst, Joern
College of Architecture and Planning, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado
MAPPING DETROIT, AN INVESTIGATION IN LISTENING IN ORDER TO SEE


The scale of abandonment of Detroit is apocalyptic. The visual urban landscape is devoid of a dense human populace and this fact is a shocking reminder of the failure of industrial society building. Streets are dangerous and there are spaces one should never encounter alone or at night. This abandonment is the very real and permissible crux of why one should not encounter Detroit. However, this is an outsider perspective, and one that cannot truly be taken seriously if we are to investigate beyond that initial visual read. In addition, the relation of the body to this immensity is illegible is a static framing apparatus—be this the camera lens or the car window.


The image depicts isolated accounts of spatial relationships—one that is actually quite incorrect and prejudiced in the context of Detroit. The perception of abandonment only holds true in an unmediated experience of this context—a framing device that cuts off connectivity. The culprit here is the inability to “touch” and, in essence, to intimately engage in spatial constructs of the city.


This is a tourist mechanism—the mechanism we have been warned is the best and only way to experience Detroit. In other words, we are careful to not venture outside of our comfort zones.


Without actually living in situ for any length of significant time, what means of exploration can be launched for the student and practitioners seeking to gain a truer and more intimate connection with the Detroit cityscape? Do alternative mediums (sound, video, tracing, etc) accessible to the artist, landscape architect, architect and urban designer lend to an opening of understanding of, engaging with and connecting to the post-industrial landscape?


As a means of engagement to launch an ongoing investigation of understanding what on earth happened physically to the post-industrial landscape of Detroit, we recently ventured into Detroit with a group of graduate students ranging in backgrounds from fine arts, landscape architecture and urban design to explore Detroit without framing apparati. Two transects were designed cutting through varying levels of density. Our students navigated these four-mile transects with video- audio equipment and began to talk not only to each other as they walked, but to others moving in a through the spaces while observing and listening to signs of life. This exploration has accessed the realization that Detroit is anything but abandoned. It is teeming with activity. One only need put the framing devices away to truly “see”.


References
James Corner, Eidetic Operations
James Corner, Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention


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Landrum, Lisa
Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba
PERSISTENT MEDIA: PERFORMATIVE EXCHANGES IN AND BEYOND TATIVILLE


In 1967 Jacques Tati released to Parisian audiences his new film Playtime, the plot of which follows, on the one hand, a group of Americans as they visit Paris on a one-day stopover during an organized tour of Europe; and, on the other hand, an individual Frenchman, Monsieur Hulot (played by Tati himself), as he tries to make his way to an appointment in a modernized district of the same metropolis. In crafting this film, Jacques Tati, as producer and director, incorporated what were, at the time, a variety of new media, including wide screen formatting, color film processing, and advanced sound mixing technologies. In following the characters through Paris, the film also features what were, at the time, new mediating devices: public intercom systems, automatic doors, self-moving escalators, portable stereos, personal televisions, and fluorescent signage; as well as an array of other novel gadgets, such as retractable pens, selfilluminating vacuum cleaners, and table lamps that double as cigar dispensers. Certain architectural monuments of Paris are also presented in the film in a highly-mediated way; for the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Basilica de Sacré-Coeur all appear in Playtime as reflections in the glass doors of the hotel, travel agency, exposition building and restaurant, where both the American tourists and Hulot spend most of their time. Thus, the individuals in Playtime, much like the viewers in the Parisian cinema, experience the city not directly but indirectly, through a mediated display of fleeting images.


In spite of involving an abundance of novel media, however, Playtime also incorporates and celebrates—through the choreographed performances of its actors—other, more basic, modes of mediation, such as gesture and speech, laughter and silence, movement and memory, as well as phenomenal and situational influences. Through these more corporeal, cultural and worldly modes of mediation—which perform in dialogue with the cinematic, technological and visual modes—the city of Paris (and Tati’s contrived set, coined Tativille) is doubly revealed. This paper proposal will describe and interpret the reciprocity and tension between the novel and basic modes of mediation exemplified in Playtime. By analyzing particular scenes and by drawing on recent scholarship on Tati’s films, this paper will further argue that it is the interplay of novel and basic modes of mediation that not only lend Playtime its peculiar appeal but also reveal the performative potentiality of its civic settings in ways that are especially telling for architects.


Although our cities in 2010 integrate newer forms of media than those featured in Playtime in 1967, the basic modes of mediation dramatized in the film persist in meaningfully animating our contemporary settings and exchanges.


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Marchessault, Janine
Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization, York University, Toronto
"TERRE DES HOMMES/MAN AND HIS WORLD": EXPO '67 AS GLOBAL MEDIA EXPERIMENT

If national dreams are obsolete and only a global vision of improvement now is viable, who can quarrel with Buckminster Fuller's assertion 'that man on earth is clearly faced with the choice of utopia or oblivion.
Herbert I. Schiller, 1967, 6.

If Edward Steichen's infamous photographic exhibition The Family of Man (1955) was structured through the image of the atomic bomb and the photograph, a little more than a decade later, Expo '671 held in Montreal, Quebec found its identity in the futuristic architectures of space exploration and communications media. As The Family of Man was exported to many countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, sometimes without its central image of the h-bomb, another fantasy of global humanity began to take shape during the cold war which would find its full articulation in the technological utopianism of Expo '67, dubbed "McLuhan's fair."

While relying upon different media, the Montreal World's Fair can be seen to have extended Steichen's humanist aspirations by creating a planetary media experiment with a variety of screen and communication technologies, including one of the first satellite-assisted world broadcasts of the opening ceremonies just a few months after the BBC's 1967 global satellite broadcast, "Our World." (Parks, 2005) The notion of the "biosphere," which was a symbolic aspect of Expo's environmentalism expressed through architectural/media experiments (and a concept that inherently influenced both Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome that would become a biosphere museum as well as McLuhan's "global theatre"), was discovered by the Russian geochemist and mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky whose work must also be considered as a model/metaphor for Expo's new planetary vision of interconnection.

American film and media scholar Gerald O'Grady maintains that Expo '67 represents the most important artistic experiment of the twentieth century. It was an event that can be read as a harbinger of the digital era to come, a precursor to the multiplication and interconnectedness of screens, of "mediacities," that characterize twenty-first-century digital architectures.2

1 Expo '67 was held in Montréal from April 28 to October 27, 1967. Sixty-one countries participated.
2 Gerald O'Grady, talk delivered at Ryerson University, Toronto, March 2008.


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McCarthy, Christine
Interior Architecture Programme, School of Architecture, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
INTIMATE DISJUNCTIONS: CINEMATIC TECHNIQUE AS INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE


Cities are architectural acretions. Layers of buildings, fragments of human habitation often literally construct the ground of, even recent, urban spaces. The contemporary requirement for deeper foundations, as city buildings rise higher, means that building architecture in the city often begins with conflicts between archaeological discoveries and commercial development. This paper is part of a larger design research project which examines how to represent the urban fabrics of different times (that of the archaeological material and that of the contemporary building) via the interior architecture of such sites. The proposed paper for this conference will investigate how cinematic techniques, which situate temporal or spatial discontinuity, might inform the physical design of the interfaces between in- situ archaeology and contemporary city architecture.


Cinema has a long tradition of continuity editing, employing representational techniques that enable the intimate juxtapositions of distance - be they ones of space or time. Cross-cutting, match cuts, continuous diegetic sound, ellipses and flashbacks are examples of techniques which seductively and comfortably effect relationships over distance. Montage, jump cuts, and split-screens celebrate and relish the abrasions which occur when dis-temporal and dis-spatial sutures are made.


This paper proposes that cinematic techniques, which situate temporal or spatial disconnection, can inform architectural strategies for the explicit accommodation of difference. More specifically, in the case of building into in-situ archaeology, cinema might inform how archaeological material, which is necessarily outside (and often underneath) a building, can be astutely designed for, as if it is within the building envelope. The paper will argue that cinematic techniques of continuity and discontinuity might offer new ways of rethinking interior architecture as a medium of archaeological representation.


References
Boyer, M. Christine The city of collective memory: its historical imagery and architectural entertainments (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c1994)
Brooker, Peter Modernity and metropolis: writing, film, and urban formations (New York: Palgrave, 2002)
Buhler, James David Neumeyer, and Rob Deemer Hearing the movies: music and sound in film history (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Marketing heritage: archaeology and the consumption of the past edited by Yorke Rowan & Uzi Baram (Walnut Creek, CA : Rowman & Littlefield, c2004)
Merriman, Nick Beyond the glass case: the past, the heritage, and the public (London [England]; New York: Institute of Archaeology, University College, 2000; first published by Leicester University Press, 2000)
Unquiet pasts: risk society, lived cultural heritage, re-designing reflexivity edited by Stephanie Koerner, Ian Russell (Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, c2010)


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McIntosh, Thomas
[The User], Montréal
[THE USER] - REFLECTIONS ON THE IMPLICATIONS OF PLASTIC CUTLERY


[The User] is a contemporary arts collective based in Montréal and active since 1997. Its two members – Thomas McIntosh and Emmanuel Madan - have a background in architecture and electroacoustic music, respectively. Their practice is now concentrated in the domain of installation art and explores the technological landscape from the twin vantage points of consumer and designer. Their presentation will reflect on some of the themes they have explored through their work over the last decade: What are the ramifications of the ideology of rationalism in design spheres? How is one to make art in the information age? How can we create work which underscores the primacy of perception and recognizes that our experience of reality is fundamentally resistant to representation?


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Mina, Andrea
School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
INTIMATE IMMENSITIES; MINIATURES, AN INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE


Small scaled objects and manual modelling are at the core of my research which is being undertaken through a doctorate which at present has as its working title ‘Intimate Immensities; miniatures, an interior architecture’.


The central focus of this research investigates the manual making of small scale objects which for the ease of this discussion may be referred to as miniatures. However these objects do not refer to a larger scaled version of something else nor do they reference any particular precedent. They are ‘things’ unto themselves and are made at a scale which is in fact one is to one. In this sense it is preferable to refer to them as objects rather than as models as the reference to models would have the implication they are smaller scaled versions being used to represent something else which would be manifest at a larger scale.


Through the use of common materials and in some instances their seemingly unlikely application, an architecture at full-scale has been/is being constructed following a working method that has as its premise the notion that an architecture at the point of destruction/disintegration may be redeemed through concerns for the ‘interior’.


The work is predicated on ideas of tensions; tension between durability and fragility, between completion and destruction, between erosions and revelations, between the object and the frame and between making and the exclamation thereof.


One of architecture’s most fundamental characteristics is its capacity to provide for and accept human occupation. If we accept we can and may be projected into extraordinary mental spaces albeit for infinitesimally small moments of time and in doing so virtually occupy two spaces in the same moment of time, then the work may be viewed in the context of a very particular type of architecture. This is architecture at full scale but at a very small and enigmatic size. Through its form and by the images it may evoke or project the work may act as catalyst and facilitator for momentary flights of fancy driven by personal narratives in the hope for those split-second moments of occupation.


To physically encounter the diminutive is in itself an experience of disjuncture. It is these immeasurable moments of virtual occupation that are the central concerns of this work and it is to this end that the individual pieces remain untitled, freed from prescriptive narrative desiring to remain material instead of metaphysical. Central to my research is the idea that we cherish within us an innate common architectural imagining capable of being triggered through associations and composition. Yet it is through these miniatures’ overt architectural connotations and their strong assertion of interiority (and hence inhabitation) that there is aspiration in the making for the object to act as a catalyst for projections into this common architectural imagining and thus simultaneously, an occupation of those virtual spaces. These highly personal and infinitesimal spaces of imaginative flight are analogous to those daydreams described by Bachelard, ‘Daydreams of this sort are invitations to verticality, pauses in the narrative during which the reader is invited to dream. They are very pure, since they have no use.’


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Miyazaki, Shintaro
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
URBAN AREAS AS TRANS-SONIC INFOSPHERES


Like fish can't conceptualize water, humans usually are unable to understand the complexity of their infospheres they are living in. Trans-sonic media archeology as a method for critical and epistemic inquiry could contribute to this problem by providing methods to audificate the ubiquitous electromagnetic waves we are surrounded by and which are responsible for creating our infospheres - our informational athmospheres.


The relationship of architecture and such a trans-sonic media archeology is build on several strata, but the most obvious one is that a trans-sonic approach listens to the temporal dimensions of the architectonics, the building and construction of spatial assemblages like cities. Like audification is important in tectonics meant as the research on earthquakes, the research on the spatial dimensions of urban landscapes needs to include temporal and immaterial dimensions like the electromagnetic infospheres build by contemporary wireless information and data transmission networks.


Adding a sonic and temporal dimension to the otherwise more or less static topology of urban city space, contributes to the endeavor of understanding urban assemblages and provides an alternative way of thinking the micro temporality of mediated cities.


This paper presents some key practices and their media theoretical context hearing the modulations and rhythms of Wifi, 3-G cell phone networks, bluetooth, GPS and other media assemblages, which are spread throught the space of urban and rural areas. It includes outcomes of "detektors" (http://detektors.org/) a project in collaboration with artist and practitioner Martin Howse, which is a cartography of user-generated geolocational sonic recordings, logs and walks of EM-spheres.


Reference list:
Delanda, Manuel. "A New Philosophy of Society. Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity." London: Continuum. 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles/ Guattari, Felix. "A Thousand Plateaus." Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum. 2004.
Ernst, Wolfgang. "Dis/continuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-Media Space?" New Media, Old Media. A History and Theory Reader, Ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan. New York: Routledge, 2006. 105-124.
Howse, Martin and Miyazaki, Shintaro "Detektors. Rhythms of Electromagnetic Emissions, their Psychogeophysics and Micrological Auscultation." Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art ISEA 2010 RUHR, Berlin: Revolver Verlag, 2010: 136-138.
Lefebvre, Henri. "Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life." London: Continuum, 2004.
Kittler, Friedrich. "Literature, Media, Information System: Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler. Critical Voices in Theory and Culture Series." Trans. and Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: OPA, 1997.


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Nason, Joshua
College of Architecture, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas
AWKWARD MAPPING


Although innumerable definitions of mapping vary greatly depending on what is being mapped and the specific execution of the map, most concur through denoting maps as two-dimensional diagrams of more complex systems. These flattened illustrations are vital due to their ability to assist one in gaining an understanding of and orientation within the more complex system which is being conveyed. The need for orientation is that which compels one to refer to such figures, in the first place.


Therefore the purpose of a map is to clearly and succinctly communicate whatever information is necessary to facilitate the orienting of the individual within that system, whether it is a building, a city, a landscape or a concept. This assumes that the system is presently understood by the cartographer and therefore navigable by others via graphic direction. This also assumes the visitors indeed desire to be oriented, guided and/or found within the system. Another assumption is that of the system being inherently understandable and communicable. However, there are instances when these assumptions are not accurate.


Systems can be so complex and misunderstood that they are not mapped easily.


Furthermore, visitors do not always desire to be found or oriented. At times, the cartographer does not comprehend the system well enough to adequately generate a map for accurate orientation. In instances such as these maps become misinformed, misinterpreted, inadequate, or in a word, awkward. Such awkward maps can be discounted as useless or insufficient, or can be used to generate new understandings of places and systems. An awkward map gets the visitor sufficiently lost, guides one to new, uncharted territories, exposes unique or unplanned juxtapositions and therefore leads to unpredictable discoveries not transmissible via traditional methods. Normative mapping is ill-equipped to navigate experiential systems or communicate spatial complexities not lending themselves to two-dimensional graphics. Such events must be mapped through inventive means that do not intend to explain understood systems, but merely communicate potentiality for something inexplicable and most likely irreproducible. Such maps are not new.


The Situationist International understood this as evidenced by their psychogeographic maps. At www.radicalcartography.net, Bill Rankin maps places, data and situations seemingly difficult to communicate. His use of the internet, equipped with editable layers, allows for the willful addition and subtraction of information, customizing and compounding results. Edward Tufte, as demonstrated in Envisioning Information, gives extensive examples of methods for graphic notation to communicate complex systems. Here, it becomes apparent that more complex, less understood systems require ingenious means of mapping in order to cultivate interpretation. What if the ultimate goal of total comprehension is relinquished and replaced with an endeavor to develop a guide that leads to further analysis?


By taking places, moments and ideas out of context and arranging them in a manner not indicative of understanding, but rather misunderstanding, juxtaposition and overlap, we can develop new methodologies for mapping. Through such efforts we generate awkward maps. Instead of explaining that which already exists as closed and understood we expose that which is not presently explained, gaining a new, infinitely valuable awareness.


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Newell, Catie
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
LUCENT CITY : LIGHTS OUT


At night the simple presence of artificial light around buildings typically indicates occupation. Calling out inhabitation or security through the visual expenditure of energy to illuminate a task or movement, and by way of use, light draws attention to the darkness; indicating that the current atmosphere of the greater surrounds falls short in providing occupants with enough natural illumination. Given the ever-present need to control discernable light levels at all times of day, night is typically countered with service infrastructures, commercial identity signage, and the haze of light pollution. Simultaneously the collapsing of light, or lack thereof, with material and spatial constraints, even by default, can construed and manipulate a space. Even so, this ubiquitous enveloping aspect of the atmosphere is often forgotten as a potent resource for design manipulation.


Most clearly explained by Mark Wigley’s “Architecture of Atmosphere”, the focus on such intangible and encompassing effects of a space may in fact be “the central objective of the architect.” Projects undertaken by Sean Lally of Weathers, and Philippe Rahm are current front-runners in foregrounding the fleeting and ephemeral aspects of architecture. Demonstrating a twist in thinking that amplifies conditions of the atmosphere (air movement, temperature, humidity, luminance, and the like), they acknowledge that in the creation of our environments the use of geometry alone is limiting. This work remains hard to disseminate, stretching visual communication standards and nearly demanding direct, in person, experience. Despite growing interests in such ambitions within the field of architecture, nightfall remains absent from most discussions; an oversight given its consistent, cyclical, presence for nearly half of our time.


The purpose of my current research, Lucent Space, is to focus on the conditions of night, and thus darkness, as a material study. The work is two-fold: a long-standing photographic series of recorded instances of space exaggerated through the contrast of darkness and illumination, and physical investigations constructed out of material and energy manipulations. The built work looks to make invested insertions, of illumination within material constructs. Never allowing the source to be revealed, this eerie synthesis of energy and material distinguish what David Erdman refers to in Glow(ing) as “the result of energy reimagined beyond its quantifiable performance and made into three dimensional and experiential effects.” This investigation allows for architecture to inform and exploit the use of night. Fleeting and weightless, with the ability to leave no trace despite a commanding impact with its presence; light is a temporary interruption and contributor, to an artificial atmosphere. Not easily drawn, and never a complete representation when attempted, photographs are necessary to capture and distribute this work and keen observations. The proposed paper/presentation runs along side photographic and built experiments; discussing their context, resultants, and situations within the field, while standing behind the opportunities to design with illumination, and more interestingly, the darkness of the city.


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Nikolov, Nik
Department of Art, Architecture and Design, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
THE LIVING PROJECTION: UNDERSTANDING THE CINEMETRIC DIMENSION OF ARCHITECTURE


While everything moves, architecture is best valued as permanent. In fact, by “architecture” we often imply the inert environment built around us, in other words - reality. The immergence of the moving image in the earlier years of the 20th century and its current domination over our culture and thought has established reality as a temporal practice. The use, management, and understanding of space are only partial without the inclusion of movement and duration as one of the spatial components of architecture.


Understanding and utilizing the temporal practices of architecture, their representations and perceptions, is the focus of intermediate-level research and design studios taught consecutively at two universities - The University of Texas at Austin and Lehigh University. This paper presents a number of biases interrogated by young architects-in-training. Their projects are based in analyses of film and architecture and explore the Cartesian geometry of vision, the ephemeral qualities of architecture in film, and the operative nature of memory and perception.


Film is an allied art to architecture: the two disciplines are complexly related. The settings for film are within the space posited by architecture. By the very nature of film, these spaces are synthetic. Architectural practice for some time now has been found in the double purpose of architectural artifact - to provide, on the one hand, for places of coexistence and stability and, on the other, to allow for spaces of interaction, movement, and transformation. The perception of movement and duration are often implied in architectural design. In the context of architectural education those special effects of architecture are difficult to design and test, partially because of the specifics of drawing as the primary design medium. How does one document, analyze and design movement and time in architecture?


The paper concludes that movement, speed, and duration are cinematic constructions of both the mind and the body and as such they extend the scopic regime of Architecture in a way that would be previously outside of thought. The student projects in discussion find themselves wedged between systems of mapping and indexing, all of which merely hint at a kind of parametric perception of space. Rather than enabling a new method of design, the students’ drawing techniques are more successful as exercises in analysis and seeing. How we draw affects what we see, and it is our belief that understanding the cinemetric dimension of architecture, in its representation and its perception, is of critical benefit to the architect who aspires to embody the inert material of buildings with techniques that manipulate space and narrative.


This talk will build on and develop further ideas and work first published in In.Form magazine in 2009 ( Nikolov, N. Time and Duration as Determining Elements of Architecture, IN.form, Volume 9, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, May 2009).


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Puff, Jonathan
ROADSTEADING ON THE ACADIAN HARBORWORKS: A WELL DESIGNED FICTION


Sometimes an architecture is far more potent as a story than it could ever be as a building. This paper examines new territories (the intersection between space and politics) and the role played by architectural representations in their contested production. It examines the agency of the design proposal in deforming and distorting popular perceptions, and how media and politics were used to transmute a military strategy into a new form of urbanism located hundreds of miles off the coast of America.


The story begins with the Cold War, and traces the history of a megastructure project to the present day. Between 1958, when it was first whispered, and 1982 when it was roundly rejected by international convention, the concept of building new maritime territory floated in the peripheral vision of the United States department of defense. During this time, the United State’s military recognized an ambiguity in the newly adopted UNCLOS treaties that defined the extents of territorial waters: a country could build its own maritime borders, establishing a new political form that became known as “harborworks territory”.


Essentially, the United States was proposing to buffer its coastline with massive bulwarks of unregulated off shore industrialization, inventing an imaginary urbanism that became known as “roadsteading”, all for the purpose of claiming control over massive tracts of marine resources.


This paper explores the channels that were manipulated by the Department of Defense to execute an international deception of unprecedented scale. At the same time, it investigates the extraordinary design that was employed in this ruse - a design which is primarily distinguished by the fact that its architects truly believed it would eventually be realized.


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Rivard, Érick
Vachon, Geneviève
School of Architecture, Université Laval, Quebec City, Québec
INTENSITY + LANDSCAPE: CREATIVE USE OF VIDEO AND MODELS FOR A SENSITIVE READING OF THE CONTEMPORARY CITY


This presentation looks into a creative method of interpreting immaterial urban design concepts leading to a better and more sensitive understanding of the contemporary city. The method basically consists of a three‐week intensive design‐research exercise intended as an initiation to the urban design studio for first year master’s students in architecture. Organized as a competition, designers are asked to submit proposals of a conceptual (and even utopian) nature as a pretext to explore themes related to the transformation of contemporary landscapes. The exploration process involves the use of models or video as an expressive medium that sheds a critical look at different spaces and territories, while also illustrating their potential for transformation.


Intervention‐oriented research on the city and its evolving landscapes calls for ever more complex and diverse sources of knowledge that involve different scales of action, countless challenges and agendas, varied stakeholders, etc. In brief, design‐research requires innovative methods of reading, at the edge of subjective data and objective analyses (Rivard, 2008), imagining and representing the landscapes of tomorrow through a creative process that is recognized as a valid way of producing knowledge (Després et al 2004). Architects and theorists are elaborating original and inspiring methods aimed, for instance, to understand the role of city’s non‐lieux (Auge 1992), to restore urban realities, to reveal landscape futures, etc. Koolhaas (1995), for one, is interested in defining new urban concepts with the use of photomontage, collages and photography. Vigano (2000) and Dendiével (2010) invite artists to interpret the genius loci of a site through photography and video to feed the exploratory phase of collaborative projects.


In that sense, the method developed in our urban design laboratory rests on the hypothesis that an artistic approach to the analysis of intangible urban design concepts – such as urban intensity and mobility ‐‐ is useful to question or even reframe theoretical viewpoints about the contemporary city. Furthermore, it is as valuable as empirical research as a basis for design. The use of videos and models, combined with the intensive quality of the creation process, helps catalyze ideas both audacious and structured. In terms of results, different forms of narratives emerge as a way to read and mediate complex urban phenomena, from « video reporting » to « sound landscapes » and « sculpted public spaces ». The complex yet fruitful interaction between conceptualization and representation, between modes of communication (form) and theoretical framework (content), yields either the basis for an emerging project or, more simply, reveals new potentialities for a given space. On a more pragmatic front, videos and models offer a lot of potential as visualization tools for bridging the communication gap between academics, professionals and citizens engaged in discussions about complex urban challenges.


As part of the Mediated Cities symposium, we propose to present and discuss the premise, objectives and results of the sensitive reading method through a selection of 16 models and 6 short videos. We intend to point out the value of such results on teaching and research in urban design.


References
Augé, Marc (1992) Non‐Lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris : Seuil.
Dendiéviel, Stanislas (2010) « La démarche du groupe HYPE ». In Carré, D. et Barbet‐Massin, O. (dir) Ville 3000 Imaginer de nouveaux quartiers à vivre à Lille. (24‐29). Paris : Dominique Carré.
Després, C, Brais, N, Avellan, S (2004) Collaborative planning for retrofitting suburbs: Transdisciplinarity and intersubjectivity in action. Futures, 36 : 471‐486.
Koolhaas, Rem et Mau, Bruce (1995) Small, medium, large, extra‐large. Office for Metropolitan Architecture. New York : Monacelli Press.
Rivard, Erick (2008) Approfondir l’analyse objective du territoire par une lecture subjective du paysage. Le cas de la Côte de Beaupré. Mémoire de maitrise en sciences de l’architecture. Québec : Université Laval.
Vigano, Paola (2000) « Un projet pour Prato », In Soderstrom, O. (dir) L’usage du projet (83‐91). Lausanne : Payot Lausanne.


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Rizzo, Agatino
Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar
P2P URBANISM: HOW INTERNET IS GENERATING NEW PLANNING THEORIES AND IMPLEMENTATION APPROACHES FOR THE FUTURE CITY.


The informational revolution consolidating from the 90’s has brought new concepts such as peer-to-peer, open source, free software, copyleft and so forth. In the last decade these concepts are redesigning social relations, advocating for the direct involvement of people in decision making, production, and management at any scale. Thanks to the efforts of the P2P foundation ( see http://p2pfoundation.net/) and its main driver, Michel Bauwens a Belgian philosopher based in Thailand , peer-to-peer (P2P) philosophy has been discussed on the web at any significant scale - from P2P architecture to P2P Warfare (see http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/).


Currently an animated debate on P2P Urbanism is taking place in the web (see http://groups.google.com/group/p2p-urbanism-world-atlas) and facilitated by a different array of contributors including, amongst others, Nikos Salingaros, a professor of math based in Texas known for its application of fractal geometry in the understanding of architecture and cities, social scientists, urban activists and myself. In this frame the discussion group advocates for a transfer of P2P principles – such as free and open-share use of technologies, theories, and knowledge (see http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/about) - to urban planning.


This group is now working on a virtual conference to discuss the emergence of P2P philosophy in urbanism and in a participatory P2P-Urbanism World Atlas mapping proto-P2P interventions worldwide including current Alternative and Open Source Economy projects in Europe, self-regeneration processes for favelas in South America, Urban Art Interventions and other activist interventions in North America and Europe.


In this paper I discuss P2P urbanism debate and its rationale as well as the direct and indirect effects of Internet movements in its core principles. The use of Internet technologies for knowledge exchange and organization will be discussed together with the role of off-line and on-line movements in P2P urbanism.


Lastly, I shall discuss the criteria underlying the P2P-urbanism world atlas1 and the role of technology in facilitating the production of collective, open share knowledge in this project. Agatino Rizzo is assistant professor at Qatar University, College of engineering, Department of Architecture and urban Planning. He is an active member in the P2P Foundation through his network Cityleft.altervista.org.


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Robinson, Ian
Programme in Communication and Culture, York University, Toronto, Ontario
TOWARDS A THEORY OF CINEMA AND PLACE


The articulation of the cinema, in all its dimensions as art form, mass culture and venue, with the spatial environment has been analyzed to such a great extent that it almost seems there is little left to contribute to the discussion (for example Webber and Wilson 2008; Mennel 2008; Brundson 2007). This paper begins by arguing for a re-orientation of the classic city-film connection in terms of a discussion of film and place. Throughout, I will illustrate my arguments with reference to several works of contemporary world cinema, notably the films of Jia Zhangke, whose films consistently emphasize a problematic of place in documenting the transformation of urban life in China.


In the contemporary world, much of the anxiety surrounding urban life and urban environments consists of a deep anxiety about place. As new forms of urbanization accelerate and transform dwelling spaces around the world, it is increasingly difficult to speak about place without mention of the urban environment. Yet too often the city is reified as a spatial form amenable to the cinema due to some architectural, cultural or technological specificity. The question of film’s relation to place expands the field of inquiry and allows for a deeper analysis of cinematic geographies. Cinema creates images of place by carving out a particular view, or series of views, of the world (Cavell 1971; Rodowick 2007).


Furthermore, cinema demands that the audience identify and engage with that world, often but not necessarily through narration, at least for the duration of the film. In effect, cinema is inherently connected to place; it works to create places by abstracting particular views and investing them with meaning. The concept of place suggests a search for stability over mobility, identification with collective ensembles and a relative position – social, geographical, cultural – with respect to other places (my understanding of place is derived from Cresswell 2004; Harvey 2009; Massey 2005). The anxiety and discourse surrounding place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries responds to representations of the world in terms of flows, networks and the annihilation of time and/or space. In short, the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences which has sought to represent the changing spatialities and temporalities of capitalist globalization and emerging communication technologies suggests a crisis of place, an anxiety that is played out in much contemporary cinema around the world.


This paper will examine the cinema’s turn to place, often urban places, in the context of this anxiety of globalizing and mediated space.


References:
Brundson, Charlotte. London in Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945. London: BFI, 2007.
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. New York: Viking Press, 1971.
Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden Mass: Blackwell, 2004.
Harvey, David. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.
Mennel, Barbara. Cities and Cinema. New York: Routledge 2008.
Rodowick, D.N. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Webber, Andrew and Emma Wilson. Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis. London: Wallflower Press, 2008.


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Sandercock, Leonie
School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
Attili, Giovanni
Faculty of Engineering, University of Rome, Rome, Italy
FINDING OUR WAY (BEYOND CANADA'S APARTHEID): FILM AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION


This presentation will begin with a screening of Part 1 of our film, Finding Our Way, which outlines the ‘contagion of colonization’, the history of toxic relationships between Aboriginal and non-Native Canada. We will then discuss the process of making the film as a collaborative relationship with two First Nations in north central BC, and what we and our Aboriginal partners hoped to achieve by making such a film, especially as ‘outsiders’ to the indigenous world. And finally we outline how we are using the film in community-based workshops as a catalyst for difficult conversations about the past, present and future. After almost a century of apartheid in this region, the film asks: is there a way forward?


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Shieh, Rosalyne
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
SPONGE URBANISM


In this paper, I will present a field reading of the city that informs an architectural project within the most infamous of America’s shrinking cities: Detroit. With respect to fields, I borrow the term from new media, with its full and continuous fields of data, and where the digital image provides the most accessible example that “blank space is not empty space.” Fields provide an unprecedented legibility to the shrinking city, one that renews the platform for operating within “cities in decline.” A field reading of the city reintegrates the oppositional solid/void, built/un-built understanding of the built environment, which may release us from a corrective model of progress and recast what was previously seen as spaces of absence as material full of potential for inflection.


The neighborhood that surrounds the house at 13178 Moran Street, an inconspicuous, single-family house in a modest neighborhood on Detroit’s northeast side, is tightly and rationally organized: access streets cross and form a grid, lined with sidewalks, defined by porches that are offset across easements, each façade punctured by a single door flanked by windows. The houses line the street, across which an imperfect reflection stares back. The project in question is a construction within this single-family house. It is a room that cuts diagonally through, terminating at a window that opens onto the southern sky. It opens up two new faces on the house, one looking north along the block and the other out onto the sky, across the rooftops of the neighborhood.


By establishing a cross-axis through the house, the cut creates a local wrinkle within the city fabric. Each house on the east side of Moran street is dark on its north side, making a regular pattern of alternating light and shadow. The room cuts a path for light to enter into the alleys during the day, and illuminates the volume between the house and its neighbor at night. The new cross-axis anticipates the removal of the adjacent, fire-damaged property, readying the house to turn away from the street and face down its more distant neighbor across an open lot. This project anticipates a new kind of urbanism; rather than maintaining the axial organization along the classical majorminor city grid, the rotational re-orientation of the single house opens a new face onto what was a residual alley.


The recognition of the in-between urban spaces acknowledges the latent potential at all positions within the urban field—a reading I would argue is afforded by the conceptual shift precipitated by new media. The establishment of an atmospheric intensity into this space aims to create a local rotation in the urban grid as the first investment in a transformation of the entire block and, if intensified across the neighborhood, may precipitate a new, multidirectional, sponge-like organization from within the existing fabric.


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Stieffenhofer, Katharina
Growing Local Productions, Winnipeg, Manitoba
“…AND THIS IS MY GARDEN” - MEDIA FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: DISSEMINATION OF IDEAS AND PROPAGATION OF PRACTICE


Propagare "to propagate" Propagare is related to the word propages, "a slip, a cutting of a vine” and refers to thegardener's practice to disseminate plants by planting shoots


“…And This Is My Garden” is a documentary film about the award-winning Mel Johnson


School Gardening Project, Wabowden, Northern Manitoba and the power of education to foster healthier life-styles and to reconnect youths to the earth. This film is not just about one school’s gardening project; the larger issues at play here are Climate Change, Food Security and Fuel Risk. It is about the need to break new ground in education and it has the potential to change the way we live.


Dissemination of Hope & Inspiration to Practice
A documentary film seemed like the best medium to “tell the world” about the success of this innovative sustainability program and about the urgent need for similar action. But more than anything I wanted to inspire & aid replication of the program in other communities. The quality of the medium is important to the successful delivery of the message: the transmission of inspiration & excitement for the idea.


In the small town of Wabowden, Northern Manitoba, two school teachers, Eleanor Woitowicz and Bonnie Monias, are empowering their students with the knowledge, discipline and skills to grow their own food sustainably in backyard gardens.


Sustainable, edible gardening addresses issues of Community Food Security, Empowerment, Environmental Improvement & and Chronic Disease Prevention. Along the way, the students develop a sense of responsibility, pride and accomplishment, and engage their elders to work toward building healthier communities and towards growing a sustainable future.


The success of the Mel Johnson School Gardening Project has already caught the attention of many influential organizations including the David Suzuki Foundation, Manitoba Conservation and the United Nations. On May 5, 2010 - following an invitation by the UN - the teachers presented on their project to the UN Committee on Sustainable Development in New York. “…And This Is My Garden” won “Most Inspirational Film” Award at the EcoFocus Film Festival, Athens, Georgia. http://ecofocusfilmfest.org/films


Media for Social Change [examples]
http://www.foodincmovie.com/ etc.
http://citizenshift.org/create-your-own-victory-garden-poster
http://www.victorygardenoftomorrow.com/posters.html
http://www.takepart.com/news/tag/eleanor-roosevelt-victory-garden


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Szczepaniak-Gillece, Jocelyn
School of Communications, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
A SUBLIME MACHINE: BENJAMIN SCHLANGER AND THE IDEAL MOVIE THEATRE


While the cinema shows images of mediated spaces onscreen, it is often taken for granted that its space of viewing is also deeply mediated, liminal, and suffused with desires to fade away and privilege spectatorial experience. For much post-movie palace theatre architecture, a tendency toward effacement forms a curious subtext. This paper argues that Ben Schlanger’s urban theatre designs of the 1930s-1950s can be read as mediated city spaces and as machines of directed vision attempting to induce a sublime, communal, utopian cinematic moment.


By the early 1930s, urban American “little cinemas” represented a transformation of filmic architecture from the ornate, elaborate and soaring aesthetic of the movie palace to a streamlined and efficient approach for idealized viewing where spatial attributes encouraged spectators to keep their eyes on the screen. Predominant in New York and other major cities, such theatres simplified architecture and decoration to encourage the viewing of film as total object rather than risk drawing attention to the surrounding space of exhibition. For many of these cinemas, this objective was realized in the elimination of proscenium arches, the minimization of ornamentation, and the positioning of the screen
to maximize audience focus on the film.


A prolific theatrical designer, Benjamin Schlanger was also a key figure in the articulation of these buildings’ salient characteristics, advocating throughout mid-century for a model that would facilitate the ideal filmic experience. Although Schlanger’s views were rooted in strict protocols, his formulations also suggested trends in the writing of film theorists such as Jean Epstein and Siegfried Kracauer and a desire to incorporate phenomenological experience into building design. While his proposals for ideal theatres were full of specific guidelines for, among other aspects, aisle widths, chair sizes, distances from screen to seats, capacities, width of screen masking, and floor slopes, underlying his approach was a hushed reverence for the filmic form and an implicit belief in the transformative power of the photogenic moment. Indeed, Schlanger might be thought of as an architect of the efficient transcendent experience, manipulating the space of the cinema into a seeing machine to more effectively induce the sublime. This paper, then, will discuss Schlanger’s influential views on theatrical construction as at once mediations of the urban space of cinema-viewing and as models for a thoroughly modern sublime experience. In the wake of modernity’s shocks and disruptions, Schlanger’s designs may be read in concert with the work of Epstein, Kracauer, and other theorists of the communal filmic space as suffusing the movie theatre with enigmatic awe and the potential for utopia; it is in the highly planned yet also deeply mediated space of the movie theatre where the spectator might look in the proper direction and find something sublime.


References
Epstein, Jean. “Photogénie and the Imponderable” (1935) and “The Cinema Continues” (1930) in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, Volume II, 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1995.
Schlanger, Benjamin. Articles in Architectural Record, Motion Picture Herald, and Architectural Forum, 1931-1955.
Valentine, Maggie. The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Wilinsky, Barbara. Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.


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Torres-Mondrego, Eunate
University of Geneva / Bande Itinérante (Switzerland)
Atelier de Paisaje, Getxo (Spain) / Campan (France)
"STALKSCAPES" CINEMATIC EXPERIMENTS IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND BEYOND

Keywords / phrases: Landscape and Film / Landscape Representation / Teaching Experiments / Territories and Moving Images / Thinking Hands / Documenting, Displacing the process / Performing the landscape / Echographies, Layers of Landscape / Cartographic Imaginary

What is important to us is the site. This means that we try to work on issues and places spatially close to us. We have been teaching in Geneva for five years in a postgraduate Architecture and Landscape program founded by Georges Descombes. Taking advantage of a structure that puts the project at the centre of all pedagogic experiences and composed of a team of architects, landscape architects, geographers, farmers, philosophers and biologists, we have involved students in a series of experiments encompassing cinematic working processes with the purpose of developing specific sets of representation tools and working processes interacting with particular sites through an approach that goes beyond the boundaries of the discipline of landscape architecture, and maybe even beyond of the notion of the discipline as such. In the past years, in addition to Geneva, Bande Itinérante (Parvu, Modrego) has tested this approach in workshops mainly in France, Hong Kong and Spain. One of our aims in preparing these experiments is to discover means of converting landscape projects into a process that constructs continuity between the representation of the mechanisms that shape a territory and the means to act upon them. With a projectual attitude which embraces process and performance, we attempt to illustrate the potential of different media to capture the constant shifts which characterise any landscape and ultimately the capacity of these approaches to drive an intense response to site.

The projection of EauMorte, a film sketch, Super8 (6'29''), (E.T.Modrego, Geneva 2003-10) commences a lecture of one hour prepared as if it were a synopsis realized with the prospect of making a film. Our various experiments are edited and mixed with images referring to the work of cineastes such as land artists using the camera as a means of shifting one's attention from product to process, Tarkovski's spaces suspended between their oniric reality and their subjective perception, Agnes Varda documenting what one hand does with the camera held by the other hand, Alexander Medvedkin's Cine-train setting in place a temporality whereby actors become spectators, or Maya Deren studies in choreography. These examples are relevant to our research because they each invent means of actively interacting with the site, of bringing one's body and subjective history into it. These modes of working prevent from one being in a state of passivity with regard to the site, from ignoring it and forcing onto exogenous material.

The discussion of these artistic working procedures will not pretend to build a complete and theoretical picture, but attempt to convey the knowledge of making that emerges from this work in process. As such it accompanies the handmade material resulting from our own experiences. Through minute and short-lived experiments we feel we have address issues regarding the transformation of the territory in large scale-aerial imagery. The choice of sites reflect for that matter a concern with vast regional planning topics such as urban growth, State-subsidized agricultural economy, ecological policy making. Towards the cartographic imaginary, the work Layers of Landscape (atelierdepaisaje) presents the territory of Geneva as a palimpseste seeking to give a coherent image of a very large territory whose interest are divided between Switzerland and the French land surrounding it. The purpose of these maps is to question the existing layering of information when it comes to territorial representation and large scale regional planning. From our point of view, long-term and large-scale issues can only be addresses with an attitude where in-depth knowledge, understanding and involvement with the site prevail. We believe this shift in the work to be critical in preparing students to apprehend and intervene on territories that mutate on an increasingly faster and unplanned basis.

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Tripodi, Loprenzo
Berlin, Germany
EXPLORING THE CINEMATIC CITY

Modern city is the result of an industrial mode of production, of which the Fordist one has been the main model. The principles of modernism- zoning, modularity, commuterism, efficience- reflected in spatial terms the socio-economical organisation of industrial society determining a model of urbanization which affected rapidly the entire world, constituting the first hardware of globalization. The post-modern turn results in a unprecedented dominance of symbolic economies, economies which have at their core the production and distribution of images and data. Such a new paradigm can be identified as the cinematic mode of production, where new media represents the "deterritorialized factories in which spectator works, that is, we perform value-productive labour" (Beller 2006). In my paper I will argue that such a shift is strongly influencing the evolution of the urban world in the 21st century, redefining cities as fundamental location in the process of production, distribution and consumption of images: not anymore the location of material production of ware, neither the main place of residence, urban centers assume the role of essential nodes in the exchange of symbolic values, setting the ground for a "cinematic urbanism". In the current understanding, cinematic urbanism referees to an approach investigating the urban environment through the cinematic sphere, assessing how films contributes to the formation of the urban identity. It can be seen as well as a way to explore the "imaginary" of emotional geographies in an urban world plastered of images. From my perspective, cinematic urbanism can be understood as well as a way to look at the structural transformation of the urban environment endorsed by the pervasiveness of cinematic devices in the information age, analyzing how moving images increasingly populate the spaces and surfaces of contemporary cities, and how urban design increasingly incorporates a logistics of perception.

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Udow, Sara
Programme in Communications and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities, Toronto, Ontario
GLOBAL ROOTS: TRANSFORMING PUBLIC SPACE THROUGH NARRATIVE


Cities are increasingly characterized by the expansion of the market economy into areas of social life, creating a public culture in which people are disengaged, alienated and act as passive consumers of goods instead of active agents of change. Scott McQuire (2008), author of The Media City explains that cities are currently defined by an influx of isolated individuals, a place where strangers will always be strangers. There is therefore a growing need for transformations of the public sphere, a public space where people are encouraged to engage in meaningful interaction, form collaborative networks and participate in dialogue with one another that will reconstitute the current meaning of public space from an arena of disengaged individuals to a place for community.


Similar to the lack of agency seen within our public culture, there is also a detachment from the current food system. Food justice movements challenge this disengagement, emphasizing principles of community participation, healthy food, social equality and ecological sustainability. The Stop Community Food Center (The Stop), an antipoverty organization dedicated to the provision of healthy food, the nurturing of social connections and the promotion of civic engagement, could be seen as a site where principles of meaningful interaction are understood. The Stop Green Barn is housed in a newly regenerated maintenance barn and is part of a larger multipurpose, not‐for‐profit community centre that is located in Toronto’s midtown area. Participating in a wide range of programming at the Stop, members and volunteers are encouraged to engage in sustainable food production and consumption.


I have been engaged with participatory and art based research with the Stop since February 2010, collecting members’ narratives in order to create an oral history project that will share stories otherwise not heard. My research questions emerge from a desire to understand, explain and illustrate the Stop’s multifaceted approaches to engaging the city’s marginalized communities. In particular, I explore the ways in which new immigrants are brought into the conversation of food sovereignty, community engagement and the creation of a sense of place within a public space. In exploring how the community food centre model incorporates diverse voices and challenges dominant narratives of food systems and cities, I specifically draw on the (hi)stories of members of the Stop’s Global Roots garden, which is a multicultural community garden located beside the centre.


The oral history project will be a collection of Global Roots participants’ personal narratives pertaining to their experiences with food and plants from their countries of origin, and will be displayed both in the garden and in a web‐based digital archive. The project emphasizes a peoples’ history, stories of cities that are rarely told. The use of contemporary media art as a way to explore these personal narratives promotes new forms of agency within public spaces.


References
Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Barndt, Deborah. “Naming, Making and Connecting – Reclaiming Lost Arts: The
Pedagogical Possibilities of Photo‐Story Production.” Participatory Practices in Adult Education. Ed. Pat Campbell and Barbara Burnaby, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2001.
Barthes, Roland. “Image, Music, Text.” Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Benjamin, Walter. Reflection. Ed. P. Demetz. New York: Hartcourt, 1934/1978.
Bromley, Roger. “Storying community: Re‐imagining Regional Identities through Public Cultural Activity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 13, 1 (2010): 9‐25.
Couldry, Nick. "Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understandings of the Emergent Space of Digital Storytelling." New Media and Society. 10.3 (2008): 373‐391.
de Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol. The Practice of Everyday Life Volume
2: Living and Cooking. Translated by Timothy J. Tomasik. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
DeLinde, Laura B. and Anne E. Ferguson. “Is This a Women’s Movement? The Relationship of Gender to Community‐Supported Agriculture in Michigan.” Human Organization, 58, 2 (1999): 190‐200.
Denzin, Norman. The Research Act: A theoretical introduction to sociological methods. 3rd. New York: Mcgraw‐Hill, 1989.
DuPuis, E. Melanie and David Goodman. “Should We Go ‘Home’ to Eat?: Toward a Reflexive Politics of Localism.” Journal of Rural Studies, 21, 3 (2000): 359‐371.
Easterberg, Kristin G. Qualitative Methods in Social Research. USA: McGraw‐Hill, 2002.
Finley, Susan. “Chapter 6. Arts Based Research.” In Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Inquiry. Ed. Ardra L Cole and J. Gary Knowles. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. (2008). 71‐82.
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text. 25/26 (1990): 56‐80.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. (1970).
Friedmann, Harriet. “Feeding the empire: Pathologies of globalized agriculture.” In The empire reloaded: Socialist register. ed. C. Leys, and L. Panitch. London: Merlin: 2005: 124‐143.
Friedmann, Harriet. “Seeds of the City.” Food. Ed. John Knetchel. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008: 240‐250.
Friedmann, Harriet. “Discussion: Moving Food Regimes Forward: Reflections on Symposium Essays.” Agriculture and Human Values, 26 (2009): 335‐344.
Gablik, Suzi. The Reenchantment of Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991.
Habermas, Jurgen. Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989.
Hartley, John. “Problems of Expertise and Scalability in Self‐made Media.” Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self Representations in New Media. Ed. Knut Lundby. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2008. 197‐212.
Hinrichs, C. Clare. “Embeddedness and Local Food Systems: Notes on Two Types of Direct Agricultural Market.” Journal of Rural Studies, 16, 2000. 295‐303.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, Ma: South End Press, 1992.
Kellner, Douglas and Gouyang Kim. “Youtube, Critical Pedagogy and Media Activism.” The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies. 32, (2010): 3‐36.
Lessa, Iara and Cecilia Rocha. “Nourishing Belonging: Food in the Lives of New Immigrants in T.O.” The Edible City: Toronto’s Food from Farm to Fork. Ed. Christina Palassio and Alana Wilcox. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009.
Levkoe, Charles Z. “Learning Democracy through Food Justice Movements.” Agriculture and Human Values. 23, (2006): 89‐98.
Marcus, George E. “Power on the Extreme Periphery: The Perspectives of Tongan Elites in the Modern World System.” Pacific Viewpoint. 22 (1980): 48‐64.
Marcus, George E. “Ethnography Two Decades After Writing Culture: From the Experimental to the Baroque.” Anthropological Quarterly, 80, 4 (2007): 1127‐1145.
McQuire, Scott. The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space. London, England: Sage Publications, 2008.
McMichael, Philip. “The Power of Food.” Agriculture and Human Values, 17, (2000). 21‐33.
McMichael, Philip. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective. 3rd. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2004.
“Murmur.” < http://murmurtoronto.ca/about.php>.
Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Collaboration in Art and Society: A Global Pursuit for Democratic Dialogue.” Public, 39, (2009): 33‐51.
Sandercock, Leonie. Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities. England: Wiley and Sons Ltd, 1998.
“The Stop Community Food Centre.” <http://thestop.org/>.
Woo, Yen Yen Jocelyn. “Getting Past Our Inner Censor: Collective Storytelling as Pedagogy in a Polarized Media Environment.” The National Association for Media Literacy Education’s Journal of Media Literacy Education. 1, 2 (2010). 132 ‐136.


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van Lierop, Dea
Department of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
INTERVIEWING THE URBAN: MEMORY AND THE (POST-)CITY


By engaging Amsterdam cyclists with what I call “guided-sketch-interviews”, I attempt to analyze the structural intertwinement of rural and urban elements of the (post-)city by means of an analysis of collected data regarding the urban memory of cyclists in the European metropolis of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The objective of these interviews is to facilitate an understanding of the general elements and unique details of a city’s public spaces, which residents observe on a daily basis, are valued most, or are most noticed by people who travel these streets on a daily basis. The elements that participating Amsterdam cyclists consider most integral to their individual communities’ are used to question the concepts of “home” and “community” as well as the “(post-)city” in the context of the twenty-first century.


Since the primary theme which arose out of the interviews was the interconnectedness between the “natural” and the “manmade”, and the difficulty in coherently separating the two terms, the analysis of the interviews will largely focus on how these concepts are interrelated and what this intertwinement means for the idea of the post-city. To understand the possibility of a post-city, it is essential to firstly attempt to understand the aspects in a city dweller’s urban memory that connect an individual with his or her personal idea of “home” and “community”. Only when aspects of an individual’s urban memory are isolated, does it become possible to understand which elements must be preserved in the twenty-first century urban transition towards the post-city. I will consider Elizabeth Grosz and Gilles Deleuze’s discussions on how individuals interact with, and are confronted by architecture, and extend these reflections to ask if city dwellers encounter the “natural” and the “manmade” differently. Because many traditional cities’ peripheries are continuously expanding from the traditional urban towards the traditional rural, I will discuss the ambiguity of where the urban ends the rural begins so as to demonstrate why some interviewed participants encountered difficulties in separating the “natural” (which I link to the rural) from the “manmade” (which I link to the urban). I will claim that Henri Lefebvre’s “urban fabric” is perhaps the most viable shape for the (post-)city to take as it does not call for a distinction between human influenced “natural” landscapes such as farm land, and “nature” influenced urban landscapes such as city parks.


This discussion of the intertwinement of the urban and the rural comes as a result of an attempt to comprehend how the shape of the city will change in the twenty-first century. The investigation of the urban memory of cyclists in Amsterdam is a starting point in an attempt to highlight possible representations of “home”, “community”, and eventually also the coming of the post-city.


Bibliography
Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001.
Harvey, David. “Contested Cities: Social Process and Spatial Form.” The City Reader. Ed. LeGates, R. T., and Stout, F. Routledge: Abingdon, Oxon, 2009. 225- 233.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.
Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau. S, M, L, XL. The Generic City. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. 2003.
Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge, 2000.
Yanow, Dvora. “How built spaces mean: A semiotics of space.” Interpretation and
ethod: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Ed. Yanow, D., and Schwartz-Shea, P. Armonk: NY, 2005. 349-366.


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Vidal, Ricarda
School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, United Kingdom
CLOCKWORK THAMESMEAD: THE CELLULOID LIVES OF A CONCRETE UTOPIA


At the end of the 1960s the Greater London Council decided to drain some 1600 acres of marshland in Thamesmead at the Eastern border of London to build what was optimistically called a “town for the 21st century” to house poor working class citizens from inner-city slums. Following the layout of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, Thamesmead features a mixture of low-rises and high-rise tower blocks with expanses of green and water features in-between. With its elevated walkways, stark concrete facades, futuristic geometries and sweeping vistas Thamesmead does indeed look like a town for the future, albeit a fictional future which is by now already past.


Thamesmead encountered its first problems even before the first tenants had moved in as the reinforced concrete proofed for Britain’s climate and damp seeped through the walls. Further, the absence of a good road system and bad connections to public transport isolated Thamesmead on the edge of the city and geographically reinforced its utopian qualities while at the same time obstructing its urban potentials.


When Stanley Kubrick looked for locations for Clockwork Orange (1972), Thamesmead seemed perfect as the home of the film’s main character Alex – the home that nurtures both his inhumane brutality and his keen sense of beauty and aesthetics. In the film the utopia of Thamesmead becomes the dystopian setting of a bleak future of a highly aesthetizised, violent and dysfunctional society.


Two years later the Greater London Council commissioned Jack and Chamian Seward to make the propaganda film Living in Thamesmead, which encapsulates the hopes of the planners. The film is told from the perspective of a young couple who stroll through the happy community of Thamesmead and eventually decide that they want to live there and bring up a family. Like Clockwork Orange, Living in Thamesmead is about an imaginary future. In its rose-tinted optimism it is as far removed from the actuality of the place as Kubrick’s bleak vision of it.


When the estate celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008 Guardian journalist Michael Collins made a documentary about it, which explored Thamesmead as a melancholy reminder of the utopian thinking of the 1960s. Collins focused on the deserted water features, the boarded up shops and the withered damp concrete facades. Looking through the lens of the urban sublime, it dwelled on emptiness and desertion, on failure and the ruins of what might have been. In the documentary, as in Kubrick’s film or in the propaganda film Thamesmead is no more than a stage-set for an imaginary future – albeit in this case it is the future of the past.


Looking at the three films and taking into account the problematics of appropriating Thamesmead as an inhabitable and homely space, this paper will explore the fictional lives of this “town for the future” in the context of the cultural politics of the 1970s and the 2000s.


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Waite, Jason
International Guerrilla Video Festival, London, United Kingdom
THE INTERNATIONAL GUERRILLA VIDEO FESTIVAL


As the ideal modernist city – characterised by the efficient and continuous flow of capital and people – becomes ubiquitous, urban space has shifted towards an increasingly smooth and singular space, leaving deviation and difference under threat from the flattening forces of modernity. The transformation, taking place in a variety of spheres, extends beyond the material architecture to effect how space itself is articulated. However it is at this fundamental level that, as Henri Lefebvre notes, “we are confronted by an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within the next: geographical, economic, demographic, sociological, ecological, political, commercial, national, continental, global. Not to mention nature’s (physical) space, the space of (energy) flows, and so on.”


This expanded concept of urban space, seen as a multidimensional, constantly shifting set of layers, is where a competition and urgency for visibility becomes critical. It is also at this junction that the artist is empowered with agency – the ability to alter, reconfigure and intervene in this visible terrain.


The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) was initiated in 2006 as a means to combat the monopoly of the billboards, advertisements and screens that have come to dominate the urban landscape. It works with artists and micro–communities in sites of contention to articulate the diversity of perspectives, share stories and provide a public platform to intervene directly on the city itself through mobile exhibitions. These interactions open up the visual environment, moving beyond the concerns of the market to engage with the discourses of the area. The videos, comprised of works originating inside the community as well as from artists working in different locations, are projected onto monuments, buildings and temporary structures, providing a site for communal gathering where a multiplicity of voices can emerge to create informal networks of knowledge.


The festival moves through the city to sites of contention involving: the confluence of visible and unperceived boundaries, the effect of past and present migrations, and idiosyncratic architecture in the landscape. The site itself becomes an integral part of the exhibition. It enters into a process of exchange, whereby its particular characteristics form and alter the artwork as the videos themselves simultaneously inscribe another identity on the space.

The portable festival uses a GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) to project the videos onto the surfaces of the city. Composed of a multi–channel sound system, digital projector and self–contained power source, the GPU is a completely autonomous cinema–on–wheels. The design enables rapid incursions into the public arena to show a number of different artists’ videos
at different locations during an evening. This fluidity allows the festival to utilise hit and run tactics to open up new strategies of spontaneity and potential in an urban context fortified by advertisements. Billboards can be transformed from outlets of commercial messages into sites of exchange that encourage discussion instead of consumption, interaction instead of isolation, and landmarks for the community instead of the market.


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Willis, Katharine S.
Graduate School Locating Media, University of Siegen, Germany
HYBRID PLACES. LOCATING MEDIA IN URBAN PUBLIC SPACE


The domain of digital space is increasingly becoming physical; an “internet of things”. In turn, it is no longer useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical, or the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (not real or not material). Consequently there is a need to move beyond the paradigm of a real and a virtual world as if the two were opposed. Instead we must develop a new understanding of our activities and behaviour in space; since online and mobile socially networked spaces and real-world places are merging in numerous and complex ways. These developments in formerly separated domains have caused a reconsideration of spatial frameworks and concepts. The work of Castells (1996), Massey (2005) and Mitchell (1999) propose shifts between the material, the symbolic and the experiential dimensions of place and between place as physical setting and as virtual or simulated location. Augé proposed that the creation of such spaces of circulation, consumption and communication results in non-places which cannot be experienced meaningfully as places and are instead mere anonymous transitory zones (Augé 1995). The changing nature of spatiality and place is also discussed by Meyrowitz who proposes that communications media re-organizes the social settings in which people interact, changing the once integral relationship between physical place and social place (Meyrowitz 1986).


However more recent work on the experience of these spaces with media suggest that although there is a creation of non-places, there is also a revaluation of ‘placiality’ (Casey 2001) and a new ‘a-whereness’ (Thrift 2008) which results in a ‘doubling of place’ (Moores 2004) so that interaction with media that is not ‘placeless’ but instead a finely layered and complex mixing of social and spatial experience. It is recognised that urban public space is transformed through locative1 media, but very little is understood as to how this effects the way that space is both perceived and acted upon. On a broader level little is understood of the consequences for social life in urban space is enacted and thus the effect on local neighbourhoods and social cohesion. Indeed one of the critical issues often associated with increases of online or mobile media use is that it can cause social fragmentation in local neighbourhoods. In attempting to progress a research agenda that seeks to re-localise media, it is critical to understand how neighbourhoods shape local communities. According to Crang et al. mediated networks need not be global and disconnected from local spaces but are instead multiply emplaced; such that they may sustain neighbourhoods rather than oppose them (Crang et al. 2010), The presence and use of media in a neighbourhood offer a new type of localised sociality, where different affordances and opportunities for ties and actions can occur at different temporal and spatial scales simultaneously (Hampton/Wellman 2002). One of the key conditions that enables the creation of a local community is realized when neighbourhoods have more meeting places (Völker et al. 2007). By addressing the role of digital media in the use and creation of such spaces it is possible to understand how these sites of localised social experience directly impact upon the neighbourhood and how they can consequently reinforce social cohesion. On a more structural level, it requires that we question how we conceive and construct the concept of public in an urban sense and how changing patterns of behaviour affect the physical design of space needs in order to respond to the layering of a media environment onto the material environment.


In this research proposal we define the term locative media as media that respond to their current location thus triggering social interaction (Varnelis/Freidburg 2008) and situating the corresponding communication practices in their local spatial and social context (Krotz 2001, Thielemann 2010). In this approach locative media are not understood in terms of technology –led applications or infrastructures, but rather as communications media that afford certain social practices and behaviours in the context of their use.


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YinHua, Chu
Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, United Kingdom
MISE EN SCÈNE THE IMAGINED CITY IN PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES


A story draws on the relationship in the cityscape of city, and projects these relationships onto the landscape of a person’s mind. The city in our actual experience is at the same time an actually existing physical environment, and a city in a novel, a film, a photograph, a city seen on television, and so on.


This presentation proposes to explore the dream-like experiences of different cities. I use mise en scène in photography as the methodology to examine the detail of architecture and the domestic in order to find its hidden secrets, the secrets that exist in our memories, fantasies and imagination. My attention is to search for locations of memory – memories that disturb the idea that the past necessarily had to lead to the catastrophe of the present.


The following photographic projects are my experiments of how the imagination and dreams can be related to the physical environment of cities, including architecture and domestic interiority. I am sharing my personal experiences of travelling in and between different cities, which will provide new dimensions to the photographic imagining of urban geography.


Project Title: Invading Memories
This project is an experiment of the ‘imaginary travelling’ of the everyday excursion in different cities, starting from my artist residency in Tokyo in Spring 2009.


For me, this chance of staying in Tokyo is different from being a traveller nor an inhabitant; instead, this is as to extract me out of my ‘daily life’, placed me in another capsule which was named ‘Tokyo’, and inserted this ‘extraordinary memory’ which was out of the ordinary. I therefore started this ‘documentation’, using readymade figurines as the surrogate persona, and took pictures everyday at 10h, 14h, 18h, 22h.


Through this regular records, photography becomes the medium to trace the everyday routine and ‘scrutinise’ the daily banality, and to sketch out or even to invent ‘memories’ that I was preparing for the future me.
This documentation has been operated for 12 weeks when I travelled from Tokyo to Taipei, Paris, Singapore and London. Mise en scène in photography triggers the imagination which transcends the mind between cities and cities, across the solidity of time and space.


Project Title: Travelling Home
‘Home’ is the psychical miniature of one’s awareness of a city. Taking my personal experiences of moving as departure, this project demonstrates how my memories are ‘staged’ in miniature, also my perception of the notions of ‘familiarity’ and the ‘foreign’ in different cities.


The function of Google StreetView provides me the chance to virtually revisit the places I used to live. I therefore trace my memories of the specific site by using readymade ornaments and constructing interior models, photographing the miniature models via mobile phone, printing them on slides, and finally mounting on slide viewers. The final presentation of the project works as specimen which has the indexical nature that implied the desire of control and even ‘replace’ the original scenes.


Bibliographic reference
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetic of Space, Boston, Beacon, 1969.
Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture, Berkeley, University of California, 1996.
Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London, Reaktion, 2004.
Italo Calvino, Invisible cities, translated from the Italian by William Weaver, London, Vintage, 1974.
A.D. Coleman, ‘The Directorial Mode’ in Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968-1978. New York and Oxford, Oxford University, 1979.
Steve Pile, Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life, London, Sage, 2005.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, London, Routledge, 2004.
Susan Stewart, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London, Duke University, 1992.
Ian Walker, City Gorged With Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris, Manchester and New York, Manchester University, 2002.


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Zarzycki, Andrzej
College of Architecture and Design, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey
MAPPING web2.0 TO city2.0


This paper/workshop presents landscape as the continuous interface between urban media facades and the ever-expanding use of digital devices and their content. Digital technology increasingly, and more and more seamlessly, bridges the physical landscape with virtual environments to form coherent visual narratives that are visually rich and emotionally engaging. Media-infused urban spaces such as New York’s Times Square expand their content into personal digital assistant (PDA) devices and often merge with online experience. This trend is not limited to these spaces’ visual identities or content delivery methods; it often redefines messages and these messages’ authorship within the public domain. By doing so, they create opportunities for, though not necessary guarantees of, greater public participation.


This paper/workshop will investigate contemporary attitudes toward digital public spaces, from mainstream media facades, interactive art installations, and mobile apps to guerrilla-like techniques such as tactical media, activist gaming, and electronic civil disobedience. Media-infused landscapes could, if handled properly, transfer the public domain back from corporate ownership to public authorship. An example of this form of public discourse is the D-tower project by Serafijn and Spuybroek (NOX), which maps the emotions of Doetinchem’s inhabitants and expresses them through interactive installation artwork. The balance between ownership and authorship of the public realm, and the role design plays in this balance, will help to frame the discussion.


Furthermore, this paper/workshop discusses examples of public participatory spaces mediated by new technologies and emerging opportunities associated with virtual social networks. The types of interactions and experiences that in the past were predominantly confined to art gallery installations or online chat rooms become main street events with broader participation and authorship. While perceived by some as invasive and overreaching, media participatory landscapes could also help us to reclaim the public realm and democratize its content.


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