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Prof: Ed Keller Guest Lecturers: TBA
This course is a seminar/workshop exploring a range of theoriesaffecting digital design in architecture and film.
Current discourse has problematized the role of the 'diagram' inarchitectural practice. This course intends to re-vision time baseddiagram work within a context of cinematic and architectural worksthat are informed by a more nuanced/complex temporal structure.
We will pursue two avenues of investigation in parallel throughout thesemester:
first, in an intensive seminar that engages a selection of thinkersconcerned with the production of 'complex chronomorphologies' inarchitecture, film, and narrative. We will read several texts eachweek and screen film clips.
second, experimenting with the animation and modeling tools used instudio processes which are uniquely suited to an abstract modeling ofprogram and perception in architectural and filmic environments. Wewill accomplish this by analyzing architectural, filmic, painterly,audio, and narrative sequences using these tools.
The films, architecture, and narratives we have chosen for the seminaractively question the relationship between space and the themes ofhabit and ethics. We will consider the ways this analysis may be usedto reveal the basins of attention in a viewer/user, which establisha particular 'narrative' structure, and the ethical and personalconditions which result.
Since the birth of cinema, architectural and urban space, and ideasof landscape have played a crucial role in the visual representationof space on screen. As contemporary discourse is reinventing the ideaof landscape and providing us with the idea of multiple layers ofoverlapping ëscapesí, so also has the concept of landscape evolvedwithin cinema.
One of the key hypotheses we will examine in this course is thepresence and function of time within cinematic and urban landscapes. Thinkers like Gilles Deleuze have written interdisciplinary historiesof cinema- his Cinema 1+2, for example-exploring the way that film functions as a highly accelerated culturalengine for the development of thinking about space and also about time.
Many different scales of time have been revealed or discovered ashuman society moved from an agrarian to an industrial to a postindustrial environment. Examples of time embedded withinlandscapes abound: geological time; genetic time; prehistorical time;cosmological time; city time vs. agricultural time; linear time orcyclical time; measured time [Chronos] and unmeasured time [Aion];reversible time as measured by classical physics or irreversible timeshown in thermodynamics and dissipative structures.
Contemporary urban theories rely on concepts of networks and agents- human, ecological or economical- which populate the landscapes that wework with as designers, and which can only be properly understood 'intime'. Earlier conceptual models for landscape were drawn from acomplex symbology and representational vocabulary. A well recognizedlineage exists which we can trace over the past 8 centuries whichparallels the way that societies construct images of themselves, buildsystems of control and economy, and the frames they build in thelandscapes around them.
Cinema has compressed into just over one century all therepresentational and philosophical themes that our built environmenthas been driven by for over a thousand years. This evolution of filmhas been informed, in many ways, by the history of landscape theory:moving from the primarily visual, to the compositional and symbolic,to the compositional and material, to the active landscape, then theurban montage as a landscape of image and action and finally toemergent landscapes: the discovery of network systems on macro andmicroscopic levels. Indeed, cinema has played a role in changing theway that we understand the nature of landscape as a lived fieldspanning the scale from the microscopic to the cosmologic.
The films we will survey in this seminar evidence a variety oflandscapes, each of which generates different forms of time. We willtrack this catalog of ' time landscapes' through several dozenfilms. A wide range of film genres and periods will give cinematic illustrations of each concept of landscape, and will be joined withselected examples from landscape, urbanism, and architecture. We willread from a core group of theorists and philosophers whose workaddresses the themes of time, power, and space that the films evidence.
A common theme present in our screenings and readings this semesterwill be that in each of the varying kinds of time we see evidenced,there is a deeply political nature. In fact, these 'Politics' of timesuggest that all experiences of this new concept of landscape are bothintensely political and temporalized.
We will use cinema to rethink the application of landscape as amediated system which establishes connectivity both in terms of spaceand time, informed by Appadurai's terms(techno, media, ethno, ideo,finance... scapes) thus adding a critical component which activatesthe idea of time as an agent in the discourse on landscape and thebuilt environment.
Students should have a general background working on the computer. Recommended software prerequisites include general experience with a3D modeling package such as Maya / 3DSMax etc.; Photoshop; Premiere;Flash or Dreamweaver.
General Schedule :
Class will meet Monday 6.30PM to 9 PM. Each class will include a onehour lecture and/or analysis of film clips/precedents, followed by ageneral discussion of the materials. Additional time will berequired to view film assignments. NB: this class is aworkshop/seminar. There will be intensive readings and viewings aswell as project work at the end of the semester. All assignments willbe submitted online in a simple web format. Assignments will bereviewed online, and will be discussed at a final review at the end ofthe semester in a ëpinupí with outside critics.
Week 1-10: Lectures, in class discussion, and external screenings andreadings will comprise the bulk of the work. Short exercises indiagramming.
Week 10-14: students will form small teams and conduct an urbanmapping assignment that will draw on and extend some of the cinematicand landscape concepts we have studied throughout the semester. Atechnology orientation session will take place around week 10, before the mapping exercise begins. This will provide a basicintroduction to Digital Video capture and editing, using firewire andDV cameras. We will discuss ways of merging landscape mappingtechniques with film making techniques. A brief film mapping exercisewill yield protocols for an urban engagment, which will be conductedaccording to Situationist ideas of the derive. This exercise will berecorded, and presented as a short digital film in a juried screeningduring the final class session.
FIRST CLASS:
Introduction to course themes; selected examples of cinematic andtemporal LANDSCAPES
Intro Class screenings
__PARIS TEXAS:: Opening in desert
__LESSONS of DARKNESS:: ten minutes- various excerpts
__MAN with MOVIE CAMERA:: Ten minutes at START
__MIRROR:: Trust Not Premonitions passage; Final sequence
WEEK 1-- The construction of VISIBILITY: theVISION LANDSCAPE
___ assigned viewing: Irma Vep [Assayas], Draughtsman's Contract[Greenaway]
___suggested viewing: Drowning by Numbers [Greenaway]
Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic
Virilio, The Vision Machine
Sanford Kwinter, 'Landscapes of Change', Assemblage 19
WEEK 2-- CTHONIC landscapes: Non-Human life,Deep Time, Slow Time
___assigned viewing: Beau Travail [Denis] Mirror [Tarkovsky],Koyanisquatsi [Reggio]
___suggested viewing: Exorcist [Friedkin], Nosferatu [Herzog], Stalker [Tarkovsky], Taste of Cherry [Kiarostami]
Michel Serres: Hermes: Literature, Science,Philosophy and The Parasite
Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
online essays on Serres and Tarkovsky
WEEK 3-4-- Landscapes of WAR; Machinic, Genetic and Cosmic Landscapes
___assigned viewing week 3: Thin Red Line [Malick], Lessons ofDarkness [Herzog], Apocalypse Now [Coppola]
___assigned viewing week 4: 2001 [Kubrick], Solaris [Soderbergh,Tarkovsky],Crash [Cronenberg], Deserto Rosso [Antonioni]
___suggested viewing: Weekend [Godard], The Third Man [Reed], FullMetal Jacket [Kubrick], Andromeda Strain [Wise]
M. Serres, continue reading Parasite and'Origin of Language'
Bernard Cache, Earth Moves
Manuel DeLanda, Zone 6 [Non Organic Life]
Lem, Solaris
WEEK 5-- The Western horizon: Landscapes of MYTH
___ assigned viewing: Once Upon a Time in the West [Leone], ParisTexas [Wenders], Easy Rider [Hopper]
Wim Wenders, from Emotion Pictures [Once upona Time in the West, Easy Rider]
The Act of Seeing [Urban Landscape..]
WEEK 6-- The Voyage transformed
___ assigned viewing: Thelma and Louise [Scott], North by Northwest[Hitchcock]
___ suggested viewing: Dead Man [Jarmusch]
Lukacs, Theory of the Novel
Jim Corner, Taking Measures Across theAmerican Landscape
WEEK 7-- CitySCAPES
___ assigned viewing: Alphaville [Godard], Playtime [Tati], BladeRunner [Scott]
___suggested viewing: Heat [Mann]
Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of NonLinearHistory
Tschumi, SIX CONCEPTS; Questionsof Space, Manhattan Transcripts
WEEK 8-- TechnoSCAPES
____assigned viewing: Conversation [Coppola], Blowup [Antonioni],VideoDrome [Cronenberg]
___suggested viewing: BlowOut [DePalma], Enemy of the State [TonyScott], Ghost in the Shell [Oshii]
Enzensberger, 'Constituents of a Theory of the Media'
Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic[revisit text from first week]
Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age
WEEK 9-- POLITICIZED BODIES: CONTROL Landscapes
___ assigned viewing: Farewell my Concubine [Kaige], Fight Club[Fincher], Traffic [Soderbergh], Catch-22 [Nichols]
___ suggested viewing: Clockwork Orange [Kubrick], Chinatown[Polanski]
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault,Expressionism in Philosophy
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
suggested: Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
WEEK 10-- CITYMAPS: COGNITIVE Landscapes: [RE]constructingnew [IN]visibility
___ assigned viewing: Man with a Movie Camera [Vertov], CARO DIARIO[Moretti], MAMMA ROMA [Pasolini]
___ suggested viewing: ROMA, AMARCORD [Fellini]
Michel deCerteau, The Practice of EverydayLife
Situationist Texts , online at www.nothingness.org
Week 11-- City Maps 2: Cognitive Landscapes
___ assigned viewing: Vertigo [Hitchcock], Wings of Desire [Wenders],Chungking Express [Wong Kar Wai]
___ suggested viewing: Lisbon Story [Wenders], My Own Private Idaho[Van Sant]
Wim Wenders, 'Find Myself a City...'
Raskin, Camera movement in Wings of Desire
Ed Keller, 'Complex Time' lecture
WEEK 12-- GEOPOLITICAL SCAPES: Politics,responsibility, and the construction of new identity
___assigned viewing: Passenger [Antonioni], Underground [Kusturica]
___ suggested viewing: Hiroshima mon Amour [Resnais/Duras], Elementof Crime [Von Trier]
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large
WEEK 13
TOPOLOGICAL LANDSCAPES: Collective time, and building anew self: the machine and memory
___ assigned viewing: 8 1/2 [Fellini], Polygraph, Confessional[LePage], Afterlife [Koreeda]
___ suggested viewing: NIN concert footage, La Jetee [Marker]
Samuel Weber, 'Displacing the Body: the Question of DigitalDemocracy'
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution
Paul Ryan, essay on the relational circuit
Philip K Dick, from VALIS
Ben Goertzel, online essays on structure of time and AI
WEEK 14-- ACTIVE TIME in the body politic:
___ assigned viewing: All About My Mother [Almodovar], Fallen Angels[Wong Kar Wai], Sans Soleil [Marker]
Grant Morrison, The Invisibles
Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution
Chris Marker, Sans Soleil text
Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
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