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January 22, 2006

Urban Voids

Over break, I collaborated with Mark Linder from the SUSOA on an entry for the van Alen Istitute's Urban Voids competition. The entry built off of GIS modeling techniques we've been developing for years now...

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Posted by mclutter at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

Herald Square

On May 11, 1896 William Heise, a cameraman for the Edison Company, recorded seventeen seconds of film in New York City's Herald Square using his employer's newly developed portable camera. This was the first recording of New York City street life. The genre of the film produced, dubbed an "actuality", was intended (as the moniker suggests) to be an honest registration of actual events before the open lens. Glancing with the benefit of contemporary eyes, one may feel inclined to accept this description. However, through an aesthetic analysis of the motion image itself, apprehending its agents within the ostensible image culture of the time, a more thorough description may be derived.

As was the essence of the new medium, the most obvious element captured in the film was a hectic motion montage. Blackened, grainy, phosphorescent figures shift about the screen in a syncopated figure-ground choreography. As the film progresses, the blackened blurs begin to decode themselves. Two male figures emerge in the foreground, walking at different speeds towards the left of the screen, while a trolley moves at an accelerated rate in the same direction- occupying nearly the entire space of the frame and smearing the anonymous silhouettes of its contents across the screen. As the trolley clears the frame it reveals a busy urban intersection with one road running slightly off parallel to our plane of vision, and the second at a perpendicular angle to the first. A crossing guard takes three slow steps backwards (momentarily disturbing the temporality of the short) while simultaneously a boy darts across the street. In the background we see more trolleys speeding through the intersection, horse drawn carriages, and a wealth of men and women in period apparel populating the scene. The buildings of the square, not completely in focus, seem rigorously geometric and are cropped at their tops in a way that makes indeterminate their heights and relative sizes. Vaguely rendered in the space between the buildings is a pedestal topped with statuary, no longer monumental in comparison to the surrounding buildings and only intermittently visible between passing trolleys and carriages. Men and women cross the intersection from all directions. From the left of the frame enters a second trolley running along the street roughly parallel to our plane of vision. Again, it occupies the entire space of the screen, spelling as it passes Y-A-W-D-O-A-R-B. Through the windows of the trolley the silhouettes return, as well as dark patches we now recognize as the fenestration of the buildings beyond. By the time the trolley wipes the screen to the right, it reveals an entirely new cast of figures. A man in a derby hat begins crossing the street. Walking towards us, the man lifts his head and glares directly into ours eyes before exiting the frame to the right and ending the film. Of course, the man was not looking into our eyes. He was, rather, looking at the camera- the first of twin monocled devices that negotiate the image dissemination of this cityscape.

Early films such as Herald Square were made public in turn of the century Nickelodeons, storefront theatres, and traveling carnivals. It is safe to assume that by 1896 most of those who viewed the film were familiar with city scenes such as these through photographic documentation. However, the impact of the motion image cannot be overstated. By giving the viewing audience what was likely their first motion glimpse of New York City, the film brings to pointed crisis a wealth of latent audience expectation. Whatever urban mythologies the audience has brought to the screening were quickly supplanted or embellished by the "fact" of the motion image. Elements that are easily digested today, such as the grain of the film and the aspect ratio of the screen, would quickly have to be rationalized and processed in this light. The entire 17 seconds being filmed from a stationary point, the images connote an objectivity that effectively effaces the subjectivity of the camera. The city inhabitants seem busy, purposeful, and internalized-curiously aloof to their filming. The city seems equally kinetic, positively writhing with activity.

Some questions are left unanswered by the film. How could it be that the city crowd was so aloof to their filming? Surely in 1896 Edison's new camera would have appeared remarkable. Yet save for the one derbied man, no one seems to notice. Were they acting? Further, why was Herald Square chosen for this filmic experiment? Was the square particularly conducive to the intended theme of the film, or simply accommodating of the practical necessities of a film shoot (lighting, space, depth of field)? What happened in the seconds before and after the camera aperture was opened?

At the edge of the filmic frame lies the threshold to the mythic construction of the city. The truncated buildings are topped with elaborate gothic statuary or they continue into the clouds. The busy city inhabitants work on Wall Street or they sing in Vaudeville or they are mugged on the train. The feigned objectivity of the shot is in fact complicit in the meticulous grooming of the space exterior of the frame. The singularity of the view renders the "facts" on screen ubiquitous, and the city becomes a field of repeated hyperbolic configurations of these elements. The narrative transcends the film, branching in space and time into the construction of the other of each individual who views the film. The implicit question: How do these constructions reinsert themselves, and to what extent will these narratives prefigure future constructions, material and mythic?

Posted by mclutter at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)

Yale SOA MED

Greetings from the Yale SOA MED program, where I am now in my second semester of what is perhaps one of the most unusual graduate programs in architecture in the country. Situated somewhere between a research-based MArchII program, an MS in architecture, and a PhD., the MED has attracted a range of students in its thirty-year history. My class of five includes three architects, including myself, a woman with a long history in interactive design and German urban history, and a guy with both a law degree and an MS in Urban Planning from UCLA. The deal is that along with the normal application materials for graduate school, you submit a project proposal. There are only two required courses in the two year program, the rest of the course work is selected by the student to align with his/her research interests. So, the whole of Yale University is at our disposal. I have taken courses in Film Studies, Comparative Literature, Art History, and Fabrication. Perhaps the most rewarding part of the program is engaging graduate students in other schools.

As advertised, the program requires a research thesis of an indeterminate format. While this is technically the case, I've found in my first semester that most professors involved in the MED program know precisely what they think the format should be. Usually this is a lengthy written piece of scholarship accompanied by visual supporting material. I aspire to have more of a balance between visual analysis and written work. It's going to be a battle.

Below is a prospectus of my research goals as they now stand:

This project endeavors to map, analyze, and draw conclusions from the relationship between New York City film shoot locations and urban development within those locales. Through a parallel reading of film shoots and urban development I hope to illuminate new and specific understandings about the relationship between the material city and its mythical counterpart of the silver screen. Further, I hope to identify ways in which the filmic and material city engage one another in a symbiotic, mutually prefiguring, relationship: perpetuating an inextricably intertwined system of parallel image and urban production. I believe that such an investigation may yield new design strategies for viable urban development within a culture where the material reality of urbanism is increasingly supplanted by its own image.

For decades a range of theorists and architects from Lewis Mumford to Guy Debord to Paul Virilio have perpetuated a discussion of the loss of formal urbanism in the face of a society with an increasing propensity for image consumption. As theorized in these accounts, this ephemeralization of the material city appears as our culture becomes increasingly image associative and withdrawn from the directly lived environment of material urbanism. New York, quite unlike most American cities, seems immune to this loss of the material. At least on the surface, formally realized urbanism is alive and well in New York. However, my suspicion is that this immunity is superficial at best. This research endeavors to reveal that New York's material resilience is indebted to its accidental manifestation of the devices of urban ephemeralization into a system of urban production that has a symbiotic relationship to its ephemeral counterpart.

This research will attempt to engage both discourses on the syntactic link between the urban subject and cinema, and the epistemological nature of the image. It is my hope that these discourses may be synthesized: yielding an understanding of the link between cinematic image epistemology, urban subjectivity, and subsequent urban development.

At the end of the first semester, we are assigned research advisors. I'm working with Peggy Deamer from the School of Architecture and Noa Steimatsky from Film Studies. Both are incredible resources, so I'm pretty excited.

Posted by mclutter at 10:20 PM | Comments (2)