Daihei Shibata: Shinkansen ver.2

Like the Gondry video for Star Guitar and Tal Rosner, [both links are in this blog].  Just love this sideways journeying.  Traveling in the Japanese high-speed train Shinkansen from Shinosaka to Tokyo.  The video sequence was shot by OLYMPUS EP-1(PEN).

Music: VanShe "So High"
 

Shinkansen ver.2 from daihei shibata on Vimeo.

London Futures

An exhibition of digitally enhanced images of London landmarks created to promote further awareness of climate change. The images are presented as postcards from the future, with the aim of 'bringing home the full impact of global warming, food scarcity, rising sea levels and how all Londoners will need to innovate and adapt to survive.' These images are impressive, disturbing, but complete fantasy. They show dystopia referring to a futuristic society that is purely fictional whilst applying symbols of real prejudice that is happening in the present and elsewhere in the world. They remind me of the last lecture, '...Other Destinations' where commonly known symbols and ideas are appropriated to a fake environment to stimulate viewers and evoke particular emotions.

The exhibition is currently on show at the Museum of London until the 6th March 2011. There are plenty of other images through the link - - Buckingham Palace surrounded by shanty towns, Parliament Square as a rice paddy and ice skaters on the Thames.

Dystopia

the game shows life in and around vegas in a dystopian future after nuclear war. it has a cheery optomistic 50s feel to it which is in stark contrast to the ruins all around.

電気グルーブ Denki Groove / モノノケダンス

An emergent dystopian scene, or just a rave, and maybe even a type of reversioning or reinterpretation of the Hieronymus Bosch painting, Garden of Earthly Delights, which we discussed in the lecture.  The film's disruptive unravelling of the animation process, its shoddiness, particularly at the end is presented as the ultimate horror.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymIn5pqRH94&feature=related

Tuomas Toivonen: U is for UTOPIA

This is SOOOOO going into one of my lectures....but... which one and which year...hmmm?

'NOW made a track for NEWLY DRAWN. It's a lecture about the history of urbanism and systemic change:'

NOW from Antti Seppänen on Vimeo.

Yaohua Yang: Latent City

Source: Boiteaoutils

'Our friend Yaohua Wang (see his Carbon tower and his interview of Wes Jones, his thesis tutor) from Sci-Arc sent me his thesis project he just presented in a room apparently fully packed ! 
The production of work is simply amazing and the ingenuity of the project is being proven in every rendering. However, a very important part of what makes his Latent City such an amazing projects is embedded in its narration and in this regard I HIGHLY recommend to take the time of watching the 15 min long movie below that explains very didactically why this city is called latent.

The narration implies the architect Foral (aka Yaohua !) finding an agreement with the State in order to build a new city for almost no money. The agreement has to remain secret because it implies a manipulation of big industrial corporations that will own the land for twenty years, build an industrial city according to Foral's plans and therefore providing an important infrastructure. When the city is built, local economic policies forces industries to relocalize their factories outside the city which is abandoned. The state can thus build a new city on the other using the already built infrastructure that has been designed planning on this scenario to occur.

The latent city is thus a palimpsest city whose transformation has been planned since the beginning.'


Latent City by Yaohua Wang from Foral on Vimeo.

Gil Scott Heron: Me And The Devil

Living in NYC I lost count of how many times this particular city was, and still is, a 'character' in the music business and entertainment industry.  We lived in DUMBO [meaning: Down Under Manhattan Bridge] an underpopulated and 'artsy' area at the time - many, many rap vids were filmed there down my street.  In spite of that and the persistence of Manhattan as film backdrop: the subway/graffiti/homelessness and disaffected youth - all cliches really - this video from GSH is startling in representing these concepts of urban realism in a monochrome, graphic language, replete with Shepard Fairey imagery and skull/Day of the Dead iconography - it's pure genius.  The album is also stunning.

Skateboarding, Space & The City: Architecture & The Body

This is a highly regarded text by a writer who is also a skateboarder and contemporary, counter-culture flaneur, one might say.  Has insight into the urban jungle as we experience through the body/space/world of the skateboarder.

Jake Dobkin: Abandoned New York

Images are from boiteaoutils blog spot, 'Abandoned New York" by Jake Dobkin. These images are interesting as they reveal layers of materials, deterioration and the decay of media over years and by many seem to have created a place of curiosity. What was there before? Raises questions of use of a space from their original purpose to total abandonment.

Parkour Motion Reel

Graphic Design Undergraduate Work:


parkour motion reel from saggyarmpit on Vimeo.

More on Unwalling

Source: Boiteaoutils
Baptiste Debombourg

"In this installation series, the wall seems to come into the room, to attack the observer. The deformation of the surface is creating a tension between the solid and the void, and it blurs the limit of the the inner space envelope. The broken surface gives a very strong materiality to the traditional clean walls of the "white cube" and the pieces of wood appearing under the white coating are like scars."

More On Unwalling

Source: Boiteaoutils
Erika Hock: http://www.erikahock.de/Seiten/Earb06.html

Kowloon Walled City Animation

Source: Boiteaoutils
Here is a short animation film by Generic Life that I found interesting because it happens to take place in the Kowloon Walled City (see previous post). There are extremely few graffiti artists in Hong Kong and making them operate in the Walled City here symbolizes the free zone - and on the contrary of what the authorities were saying, apparently not so dangerous - that represented this incredible densest area in the world (50000 people were living in it).

Kowloon Walled City can obviously not be literally considered as self-constructed. However, this Hong Kong district acquired a kind of autonomy for years and could not stop densifying itself until it was demolished by Authorities in 1993 (See Ryuji Miyamoto's photographs of the empty Walled City, ready to be torn down).  The Walled City tackles an interesting problem about the connection such autonomous districts could have with legality.  In fact, there has been a strong phantasm of insecurity about it, probably encouraged by the authorities when neutral reporters Greg Girard and Ian Lambot ("City of Darkness") from where almost all remaining photographs are from) affirmed that the district was the shelter of drug addicts but not criminals.  Before it was demolished, the Walled City was the home of 50 000 inhabitants reaching an incredible density of 1 920 000 inhabitants per square kilometre.

As far as self-construction is concerned, let's quote City of Darkness:

"With lifts in just two of the City's 350 or so buildings, access to the upper floors of the 10 to 14 storey apartment blocks was nearly always by stairs, necessitating considerable climbs for those who lived near the top. This was partly alleviated by an extraordinary system of interconnecting stairways and bridges at different levels within the City which took shape -somewhat organically- during the construction boom of the 1960's and early 1970's. It was possible for example, to travel across the City from north to south without once coming down to street level."  Let's add to this description, the one of this grid placed over the district's temple (right in the center of the Walled City) on which inhabitants having their windows on the courtyards throw away their garbage, transforming the temple's environment into a shadowy underworld.

Splitting The Atom: Massive Attack Video

Source:  Boiteaoutils


Massive Attack-Splitting the Atom-directed by Edouard Salier from edouard salier on Vimeo.

Oasis - Morning Glory

A video which shows the mundaneness and difficulties of living in a Tower Block.

Music Video With Animated Brutalism

Visual Music - Amon Tobin music video from 12FRAMES on Vimeo.
Making Of: http://12frames.de/motion.html
This short was selected by ONEDOTZERO and will be screened as a part of "terrain" 08/09.

My graduation film. It´s a music video about a man trapped in a dream. His world, consisting of "plattenbauten" (buildings made with precast concrete slabs) begins to fall apart...

space & identity

This is a very moving movie! It highlights space in memory, utopian visions, identity, escapism. Restlessness in a space. Wanting to get somewhere better. For what?

Videos. Streets in the Sky. The City

Hi Guys

Here is a link to some videos I have posted on youtube. Streets in the Sky documents some of the history and redevelopment of Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. Whilst The City focuses on the people of Bath's fight to stop the redevelopment of the city by Patrick Abercrombie after World War 2. Apologies for each video being in four parts, but youtube won't accept clips longer than 10 minutes. Hope you enjoy. Rich

www.youtube.com/user/richmellowyellow

Heterotopias in Cinema

More on Utopia/Heterotopia:  I've just been forwarded this link from a french blog site, not all the movies are mainstream but there are some very well known movies in the list, it does help with definitions of the term Heterotopia....

Andrei Tarkosvky: Stalker (1979)

Andrei Tarkovski: Solyaris

Solyaris (1972) is my personal choice for the 'film dystopia hell space' category, although I couldn't quite get the clip I was looking for, but this one of the famous highway scene will do - I think it was shot in Osaka, Japan. The story was also made into a film by Stephen Soderbergh, Solaris (2002) which fleshes out the narrative more or reinterprets differently?  Both are from the book Solaris (1961), by Stanislaw Lem.  It is one of the most engaging movies I have ever seen - but it takes a couple of viewings but also patience, because it's slow, quiet and, well, dreamy...