Campus Obscura

| Campus Obscura |

| Campus Obscura | Nicholas “Whitey” Lowe University of Florida G|SoA 2011 Gainesville, Florida

M.R.P. Critics Hailey, Charlie - First Chair Maze, John - Second Chair

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| Campus Obscura |

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Contents Research Abstract 11 Introduction

| Campus Obscura | 15-29 Campus in Focus 18 House of Silence 20 Picturing Theatres 22 Seascapes, Screens 24

& Horizon Lines Montage 30

Films Rear Window 32 Rashomon 34 A Snake of June 36

| Body Obscura | 48-67 The Mouthpiece 51 The Neon Genesis: Evangelion 54 Speedgrapher 62 Voyeur & Voyager

Flaneur 72

The Box Man 74

The Panopticon 76

Virtual Campus Voyeurism 78

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|Orient|ation

Anonymous Hong Kong 85 HyperText 92

Kyoto 105 |Experiments|

Aperture

Framing Fairytales 117 The Digital Narrative 129

Image

Storyboarding 139 Screen

Blueprinting 149

Woodblock printing 161 Pinhole Photography 171

|Campus Obscura|

The Site Didactic campus (screen) 186

Intinerary Cinematic sequence 192

Vehicles of Shadow Camera Obscura 197 Chamber of light 231 Water Lens 213 Cosmorama 247 Cinerama 275

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Conclusion Fade out 291 Appendix

Writing Narratives 296 Body Projections 307 35 mm Photographs 316

Bibiolgraphy

References and Images Used

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Research Abstract |Campus Obscura| investigates the camera and fragmented perspectives of juxtaposed images in sequence. The project utilizes conceptual theories of film ( dialectical montage/ Mise-en-scène) as a framework to understand the construction of time. The camera and its movements establish a syntax that modifies and creates spatial sequences.

Following an itinerary through the University of Florida campus, this project maps the relationship between camera and filmed space. Perspective and observation studies reveal a variety of ‘apertures’ in which these sequences takes place (The Box Man, flaneur, and Panopticon).

These modes of movement establish unique relationships between the voyeur and the voyager, defining a specfic contextual response and altering one’s perception and therefore conception of a spatial sequence. Optical structures located along the cinematic path function as an imaginative vehicle for travel.

These pre-cinematic Vehicles of Shadow operate as an apparatus for site-seeing and nomadic curiosity. By dislocating the travel space through light and the projected image, inhabits move through spatiotemporal boundaries cognitively mapping space.

Constructing a variety of optical devices uncovered the mechanisms for shadow and space construction. The camera apparatus uses a shutter and aperture in the lens to control the amount of light, in order to achieve a specific exposure. Part of understanding the perspective, is the function and role of the manipulation of light via the shutter and aperture (time, space).Understanding architecture as the construction of the conception of boundaries and thresholds is ultimately based upon our perception. This perception relies on the often gradated and shifting measure of interior and exterior conditions and the relationships to which out inhabitation becomes realized. It is important to understand our definition as we understand our cities, as a constant flux and evolution that perpetually defines and redefines itself. With this in mind, the city is truly understood in motion while traversing its spaces, accommodating to the rhythm and growth and meaning. Travel, therefore, becomes the means in which to experience space and understand its relative relationships between interior and exterior. Film negotiates this cognitive “traveling” through space as the camera becomes the voyager.

Campus Obscura explores architecture through filmic boundaries and fragments the linearity of perspective representation revealing a depth of human experience and temporality of vision embedded in synthetic perception. The University of Campus becomes a unique context for these didactic experiements and challenges the perception of place.

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I am kino-eye. I am a builder. I have placed you, whom I’ve created today, in an extraordinary room which, did not exist until just now when I also created it. In this room there are twelve walls shot by me in various parts of the world. In bringing together shots of walls and details, I’ve managed to arrange them in an order that is pleasing and to construct with intervals, correctly, a film-phrase which is the room. I am kino-eye, I create a man more perfect than Adam, I create thousands of different people in accordance with preliminary blueprints and diagrams of different kinds. I am kino-eye.

Dziga Vertov 1923

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Introduction | Campus Obscura | cam·pus (kam’pes) (n.) : campus latin for “field”

a. principal grounds between buildings of college or university b. a yard, field, or park-like space at a college

ob·scu·ra (ob-skyer’a) (v.) (adj.) : obscura latin for “dark”

a. shrouded in or hidden by darkness b. indistinct to the sight or any other sense c. to conceal

FADE IN: EXT.

UF Campus - Day/Rain

Series of shots, Montage Campus Life.

- Pedestrians rush under black umbrellas

- A Bus idles in a puddle

- Century Tower chimes 3 pm.

INT.

Slow tracking into Dwelling

Male Student, silhouette, stands motionless near window.

Shot widens, revealing the room as a Camera Obscura

*Shutter Snaps*

(Thinking to himself).

The Campus is a device, a camera. Conditioned inhabitants search for an unconscious or sublime goal, observing light as truth. The camera controls the eyelid, the focus, of a dilated unflinching eye. I have been slowly awakening to the fact that I am under the spell of this place, in its shadow. I have built my own camera, and become a voyeur, observing from a distance. And with every shutter snap I follow this process of awakening and seeing. I am a voyeur in the Campus Obscura . . . .

This thesis, Campus Obscura, is written by an estranged voyager. A familiar stranger, who has become a voyeuristic urbanite. He embarks with an observer-participant dialectic. He is a student, a sightseer, a photographer, a tourist, but above all a traveler.

The term Campus Obscura implies a departure from a defined or normative path, a deviation from a route, a departure from principlesan act of making the course obscure and utlimately go astray. The two words Campus and Obscura bind this juxtaposition, layering the familiar itineraries of campus against alien detours. The UF campus therefore becomes a terra incognita, beneath the mask of the familiar.

Campus Obscura investigates film as method of image/sequence construction. The projected image is a means of cognitive mapping, allowing travel through spatio-temporal boundaries. The film is therefore a window or vessel that transports. The film is also intrinsically linked to the architectonics of the space in which it is projected. Film theaters present a diverse variety of potential cinematic experiences, and therefore a variety of methods of mapping spectatorship. The conception of the film is altered by the space and architectonics of the cinema. We, as spectators, can participate differently given that a variety of models of specatatorship are built into the architecture of the theater itself.

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Film’s undoubted ancestor . . . is -- architecture.

Sergei Eisenstein

Campus in Focus (University of Florida) Our experience of the University of Florida campus is directed towards things only through particular set of thoughts, concepts, and images. These concepts create the content or meaning of a specific experience and are distinct from the things they present or mean. When taking into account the overall structure of consciousness as the mode of perceiving experience, spatial awareness, attention, embodied action, and even awareness of one’s own experience reveal the complex nature of consciousness. These concepts within our consciousness contribute in establishing the intentionality in experience. This intentionality is what shapes the actual experience of perception.

Moving beyond the objective essence in nature as a defining characteristic, one should instead understand the mode of consciousness which is the vehicle for transporting this event into experience. The experience itself moves beyond the event when translated into ones mind and is continually reconstructed by the memory of that experience.

This project intends to explore the intentionality of the consciousness within the understanding of the University of Florida’s campus. In order to truly understand the nature of this site completely one must understand the bodies’ engagement into the landscape. The relationship of man into the context of his surroundings becomes that which defines landscape. Cultivating an idea of nature as purely observational (seemingly removed, hands off, disconnected approach) lacks complete understanding of how nature impacts our experience and thus that which nature essentially is.

The digital camera has become a very popular means of recording and often takes the place of memory. It has made the idea of capturing nature a hurried procedure that takes the place of thinking.

One can simply snap photographs and instantly view their result in a small frame. The memory of the site no longer has meaning but is stored unchanging into a digital format that has no real relationship to the landscape nor to the picture taker. In order to truly understand Payne’s Prairie or and landscape one must find time to understand the place, and the presence in that place and the relationships between things.

With the aspect of digital photography, phenomena is no longer experienced and the landscape still exists outside the viewer. As stated earlier, the idea of mans embodiment in nature is crucial the understanding of the essence of the thing observed and also equally important its relationship to the viewer. In this case the digital camera has cut out the aspect of experience and turned nature into a surface of meaningless colors and shapes. Sensation and consciousness are beyond the visual nature of a single photograph and greatly affect the understanding of landscape.

Campus Obscura redefines the nature of the horizon line, so as to provide an ulterior mode of viewing landscape or context. Specifically setting a series of three black and white landscape photographs and organizing them in a way that contests the usual manner in which their horizons are viewed. For example, a cloud’s edges becoming the ends of a power line that subsequently become the top of trees, all seamlessly assuming the contour of the earth.

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The film is a play on surface, the theater is a play in space, and thus difference has not been realized in any architecture, either that of the theater or the cinema. The ideal cinema is a house of silence.

While in the theater, each spectator must lose his individuality in order to be fused into complete unity with the actors . . . . This is the most important quality of the auditorium; its power to suggest concentrated attention and at the same time to destroy the sensation of confinement that may occur easily when the spectator concentrates on the screen. The spectator must be able to lose himself in an imaginary, endless space.

House of Silence In understanding the methods of spectatorship we must turn to the architecture of movie theaters. Throughout this thesis the spatial intersection between the wall and the screen will be explored as the device that creates cinema. The film requires more than the apparatus that simply projects the image, it demands a space, a container, a public site, a movie “house.” The public nature of the theater turns the film motion picture into a social event. “Located in the public architecture of the movie theater, the motion picture is a social, architectural event. The film experience involves a spatial binding just as an architectural experience can also embody the fiction of a cinematic path. As street turns into a movie house, the movie house turns into the street.”1

The Film Guild Cinema was designed by architect Frederick Kiesler in 1928. Keisler was more than an architect, among other things he was a theater designer, artist, and a theoretician. Located on the main street of Greenwich Village in New York City, the Film Guild Cinema seemed to react with the very pulse of the city’s momentum.

Kieslers’ intention with this theater was to create a ‘house of silence.’

The theater was conceived with a specific type of film spectatorship in mind. Careful acoustical aspects and spatiovisual considerations were taken into the design intentions of this theater. Among one of the most defining characterics of this theater was the controlling of the screen.

1. Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film Verso, New York, 2002, 44

Frederick Kiesler

Kiesler’s screen could change with respect to the size of the image being projected. An expanding and constricting “irus” could be controlled to adapt to the geometry of the film being displayed.

This device was called the “screen-o-scope” and resembled that of the aperture of a camera. According to the design specifications the screen could contrict down to a one-inch square, as well as become enlarged enough to reveal full sized screens. This design choice accomodated a variety of mediums ranging between that of 35 and 16mm presentations.

Kiesler’s theater was certainly an expression of modern aesthetics and was considered radically different to the type of theaters being designed at the time. Theaters at the time, were extremely ornate, and phantasmagoric. They created an atmospheric sensation that lunged from the architecture inself to place the spectator in a ‘dreamlike’ setting. Kiesler’s Film Guild Cinema, however, was a journey of a different kind. The “screen-o-scope” acted more as a machanical eye, and the space seemed more like the inside of a camera.2 The idea of a ‘house of silence’ reduced the qualities of the space to just that, silence. This resulted in the audience becoming enveloped into the spatiality of the theater and thus the film. Kiesler coined this space as an “Optical flying maching,” believing that the spectators were flying and moving at the speed of light.

2 Frederick Kiesler, “The Art of Architecture for Art,” Art News, 1957 v. 56, no.6, p. 41-43.

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Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes.

Hiroshi Sugimoto3

Picturing Theatres Film does not exists by itself. There is an architectural environment that accompanies the perception of the motion picture. As understood by kiesler the architecture aimed to become invisible as to make the screen visible. There was an act of dematerializing the architectural surfaces to allow viewing to exist without distraction.4 In contrast to Kieslers view of the inward voyage or architecture of silence there was another model of spectatorship forming and it was that of the extension of the urban spectacle of transit. Ornate and extravagent decoration organized the walls of the movie palace. It ushered in urban spectators into luxurious lobbies and open spaces.

The motion picture wasn’t the main focus of the event. The screen itself can be seen as rather small in relation to the overall space and articulated sets of stage framing.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs show a filmic geneology of the architectonics of filmic space. In his photographs(left) he exposes the photographic film for the entire duration of the movie to reveal a completely white almost glowing screen. The framing devices and spaces of the theater itself are illuminated by the film’s projection. The photographs therefore capture this dialogue between arhitecture and film, and reveals the particular physiognomic characteristics of the filmic space.

3 “Hiroshi Sugimoto” , Accessed Mar. 1 2011, www.sugimotohiroshi.com 4 Frederick Kiesler, “Building a Cinema Theater,” New York Evening Post, 2 February 1929

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Seascapes, Screens & Horizon Lines “Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention and yet they vouchsafe our very existence.The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there water and air. Living phenomena spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light, though that could just as easily suggest random coincidence as a Deity. Let’s just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example.

Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea.

Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.”5 What is a horizon line? In our every day perspective, the idea of a horizon line operates as a reference, orientation and division between ground and sky, what one would determine to be, the “essentials” of every landscape. The sea becomes a vast plain uninterrupted by skyscrapers or mountain rangers, thus the horizontality of the site becomes stressed and seemingly endless. Our perception of a horizon line is a form of distinction within nature itself. This ideal condition is denoted as a line but exists only as a method of observation or attempt to harness the idea of separation in nature.

The phenomenological natue of Seascapes is structured through the consciousness of the first person point of view. Intentionality becomes the essence of experience and this “directedness” of experience towards an idea, is based upon content and meaning. The phenomena of the site are based upon these appearances, or how they appear in our experience, and too often take the place directly of the content and meaning. Understanding that these conscious experiences of phenomenon and qualities of the site are from a subjective point of ciew, we must understand that it is more than mere sensation, but that these perceptions address the meaning things have within out experience.

This approach focuses on the significance of objects, time, and self and their relationship to the experience of the perceiver.

5 “Hiroshi Sugimoto” , Accessed Mar. 1 2011, www.sugimotohiroshi.com

Ligurian Sea, Savoire, 1982

Caribbean Sea, Jamaica, 1980

Baltic Sea, Ruben, 1996

Aegean sea, Pillon

1990

North Atlantic, cape Breton

1996

Baltic sea, Ruegen

1996

Sea of Japan

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Traversing the Moving Picture mon·tage män-täzh, mōⁿ (n) french for “putting together”

a. the production of a rapid succession of images

in a motion picture to illustrate an association of ideas

b. series of short shots edited into a sequence to

condense space, time, and information

Methods of Montage

“An architectural ensemble . . . is a montage from the point of view of a moving spectator . . . . Cinematographic montage is, too, a means to ‘link’ in one point--the screen-- various elements (fragments) of a phenomenon filmed in diverse dimensions, from diverse points of view and sides.”5

1.Metric - where the editing follows a specific number of frames (based purely on the physical nature of time), cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image. This montage is used to elicit the most basal and emotional of reactions in the audience.

In understanding the methods of traversing the moving image we can visit the work “ Montage and Architecture,” written by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1930s. In his essay Eisenstein documents a method for understanding the architectonics of film. He calculates the travel practices and methods for the moving spectator in both architecture and film. Regarding the immobile spectator of film, Eisenstein reveals and interplay between mobility and immobility as the spectator is taken on an imaginary path and creates the potential for traversing multiple trajectories and sites instantaneously. The architectural voyager also moves through a building and connects with the visual spaces creating a cognitive ‘whole’ of the spaces they are moving through. Eisenstein explains that the consumer of the architectural viewing space is a prototype of the film spectator.

2.Rhythmic - includes cutting based on time, but using the visual composition of the shots -- along with a change in the speed of the metric cuts -- to induce more complex meanings than what is possible with metric montage. Once sound was introduced, rhythmic montage also included audial elements (music, dialogue, sounds).

Eisenstein generates an understanding of film and architecture that is based upon the dynamic movement of the changing of the position of the body. This embodied territory is cognitively mapped by the shifting of space through travel and motion. The spectators are not fixed to a point, or taking part in a static gaze. Within both architecture and film, the inhabitants or observers become dynamic entities that move through the space, making space with their individual journeys...” a montage sequence for an architectural ensemble . . . subtley composed shot by shot.”6

5 & 6 Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture” Assemblage, no. 10, 1989 , 111-31

3.Tonal - a tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots -- not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics -- to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage.

4.Overtonal/Associational - the overtonal montage is the cumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect.

5.Intellectual - uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning.

Ex. Intellectual montage examples from Eisenstein’s October and Strike. In Strike, a shot of striking workers being attacked cut with a shot of a bull being slaughtered creates a film metaphor suggesting that the workers are being treated like cattle. This meaning does not exist in the individual shots; it only arises when they are juxtaposed.7

7. Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture” Assemblage, no. 10, 1989 ,117

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“A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.”

Grace Kelly Rear Window Rear Window 1954 Alfred Hitchcock

Exposing the Voyeur Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, takes us on a visual study of obsessive human curiosity. The film explores aspects of voyeurism. The protagonist (James Stewart) is a magazine photographer who becomes confined to a wheel chair because of a broken leg. The immobilization of the protagonist creates a fixed point, through the facade of a New York apartment, in which most of the films shots are taken. This voyeuristic surveillance is shared with the audience of the film, as they are witnessing the same angle of the adjacent apartment buildings as the protagonist.

The ‘lens’ of the film becomes the architectural aperture of a window.

The adjacent apartment buildings offer a variety of simulataneous views into the apartment interiors of others. The actions perceived through this aperture are frequently incomplete, fragments of daily life. However, these fragments become pieced together and begin to form, what the protagonists believes to be, evidence of murder. 8 The film positions the audience in the theater within the apartment of the protagonist. We as spectators, keep the same perpective throughout the duration of the film, and thus bring the audience into the film itself where the protagonist and the audeince identify as one in the same. This positioning of the audience and orientation of viewer to spectator is carefully constructed as the film’s camera becomes the actual camera of the character’s in the film.

For the most part, we observe passively as voyeurs of the events occuring across the alleyway. We survey the events as outsiders, positioned safely behind our apartment window, the viewfinder of our camera, and finally the screen of movie theater. Hitchcock crashes through these boundaries in a visual moment when the antagonist breaks the fourth wall and peers back at the audience. In a single glance, the protagonist becomes a participant in the events of the film, as the viewer suddenly becomes the viewed. The audience has been spotted, the antagonist has become aware, and the voyeur exposed.

8 Ken Mogg , “Alfred Hitchcock”. . Senses of Cinema. Sensesofcinema.com.

Retrieved 18 July 2010

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Rashomon approaches a theoretical limit of zero all around, with all potential viewers as equally outsiders.

Rashomon 1950 Akira Kurosawa

Dislocations One of the most pivotal Japanese films in history is Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa. Directed in 1950, this film became Japan’s introduction into international cinema. This filmic text began a unique dialogue between the West and the East. Rashomon translates in english to “the Rasho-gate.”

The Japanese were extremely puzzeled by the strong reaction and success of the film in the West. The film itself was in disfavor in Japan.

The Japanese began to assume that Westerners like gates and rushed into production on “Gates of Hell.”

The film is known for its multi-narrative structure, and poses a variety of unique and different readings of what actually occurs within the film.

The plot reveals three different accounts of the same event from three individuals whom all claim to have experienced the event differently. What is uniquely ironic is how this film becomes a hinge between modalities of time and two cultural contexts. “Rashomon approaches a theoretical limit of zero all around, with all potential viewers as equally outsiders.”9 Rashomon demands a specific interpretation that relies primarily on the visual text. The film succeeds in reconfiguring all relevant contexts until they are secondary to the image text on its own terms. As stated above, the film exists between the East and the West. Rashomon is miscontrued by the Japanese, and have failed to understand the Western reading of the film, trivializing its success and meaning. The West are introduced to Japanese Cinema through this film, and pivote all other readings of Japanese Cinema around this example.

9 Scott Nygren, Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the unfolding of history, Minessota, Minessota Press, 2007 p. 103

Scott Nyrgen

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----Begin with one fold symmetrically dividing the square into halves.----

A Snake of June (Rokugatsu no hebi) Shinya Tsukamoto

Folding Film

From absolute darkness, the film cuts to a large magnesium filament flash bulb looking directly back at the screen. The film is a moving cyanotype and the lens of a camera reveals itself bobbing subtlely in the frame from a tired shoulder. Anxiety builds within imperceptible movement. A hand cradles the lens, adjusting for focus, relentless in its stare towards the screen. We see through the lens for a brief moment aimed at a woman returning our stare, eyes unflinching. Finally, the shutter snaps into an eruption of white light and whining mechanical gears.

The scene slips into a seizure of shots and sound, echoing between man(photographer), woman, and camera. The flash bulb illuminates the room and turns the girl into a blue and white ghost, who with every shutter snap, becomes increasingly naked.

The man’s narration begins to hum over the scene, “A small camera won’t do. It has to be a big one with a flash. That’s the first thing to put a woman in the mood.” The scene becomes flooded with light and orgasmic screams until fading back into darkness.

The film immediately introduces the three players: man, woman and camera.

Their relationship is hinged on the camera, which becomes a device to ‘see.’ The format of the film is a perfect square reflecting the ancient Japanese art of origami’s beginning form. The single fold dividing the square into halves thus becomes two surfaces which are man and woman, connected through a fold which is the camera.

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----Valley fold left half, and align it to the centered crease----

Folding Film: Woman 00:08:42

Blue and white rain deluge through the streets of Tokyo, soaking the city. The characters are glistening from rain and sweat. In their apartment, the woman sifts through her damp mail and begins opening a large envelope addressed to her, “Rinko Tatsumi .” She delicately severs the top of the envelope including an intricately wrapped makeshift paper envelope. She unfolds the four corners revealing a stack of photographs.

Her eyes dart through black frames, as she realizes they are photographs of her. Quickly she flips the photographs creating a stop motion sequence that begins to animate her actions. The photographs follow her alone through the rainy streets and capture her private movements as she is masturbating. Anxiety pours like rain through the room.

The film reveals the first physical manifestations of the camera.

The photographs witness the main character Rinko masturbating in the rainy streets of Tokyo. The camera becomes a device which not only displaces time but reveals the previously unknown event to the audience and evidently to Rinko herself. The shear disbelief of this event being captured on film is shared simultaneously with the fact that she is even capable of such an act.

By displacing this event through another perspective and time, Rinko is able to become aware of another side of herself. It is in this way, that the camera becomes a time machine allowing a self reflection of the main character to occur. The photographs become “proof ” of this occurrence and hold a mirror up to Rinko displaying the truth she has been hiding from.

00:33:46

A stop motion-like sequence is used to display and animate the photographs. The main character herself rifles through the stack quickening and pausing just as her actions within the photographs suggest. There exists an extreme nervousness in her discovery of what happens within the sequence, further expressing the impact that this self reflection forces. The film jumps between Rinko viewing the photographs and her own point of view of the sequence. The film’s camera movements force a visual relationship between identity and action, by frequently jumping between the points of view.

The camera subjects us to the emotions of Rinko, as well as, being a part of the discovery that these photographs are of her(us). Just like Rinko, the audience is forced to see and be seen.

The camera becomes a mechanism that plays between voyeur and voyager. The valley fold only on the left side, signifies Rinko’s self reflection. She is in fact, folding upon herself as she is both viewing and being seen. Rinko remains intact on the left side of the origami. Her fold is then re-aligned with the hinge of the camera which became the catalyst for the valley fold. This fold occurs independent of the right half of the origami which signifies the side of her husband, still connected but she is changing.

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----Mountain fold right side, and refold crease back onto left side---

Folding Film: Man 00:46:02

Eyes open, dilated, surrounded in complete darkness. The drugged grogginess diminishing as he returns to consciousness.

With hands bound, sweat pours down his features as his eyes struggle in search for light. A short click followed by a blinding light, beams his forehead just between his eyes. He peers out, his vision limited to a single pinhole directly in front his face, inches away. He begins to make out shapes and then finally a bird on wallpaper. He methodically scans what seems to be a room in a slow curious sway in order to identify something. Suddenly, a female groan directs his pinhole view to a man.

The film suddenly reveals the husband and a camera obscura contraption that is mounted to his face. A large black cone is focusing his view into one single pinhole that is revealing only fragments of the scene. A painful grimace flashes across a woman’s face as a man is violently grunting. Two men are holding down a man and woman, forcing sexual intercourse between them.

The husband frantically directs his gaze to first the faces of the individuals and then to the action of sex. He squints, intent on focusing his eyes to identify the man and woman. The scene pours through the black cone revealing only portions of the event at a time.

The camera cuts and reveals a room of men all audience to this sexual performance. The black cone strapped to their heads move synchronously, between their faces and the act, and then back to their faces. The twitching head motions create a dance of ambiguous viewers, eager to identify, building the image with

The sexual performance finishes and the camera obscura contraption is folded and opened to a larger size aperture, by mysterious men. The husband can now see a broader field of view as he witnesses the man and woman being placed in a container with a glass porthole on the side. The container is then sealed. Rainwater from the outside roofs pours down and into the container flooding it rapidly. The husband rises to his feet panicked as the two scream and bang on the glass before it is finally filled to the top.

The film takes the husband into an erotic nightmare, controlled carefully by a camera device. The device controls his view and aperture of the scene. Essentially the device mounted to his face becomes his eyes, and forces a fragmentation of the scene. The man is becoming subjected to the sexual fantasies and horrors of others, and carefully “allowed� to see only portions at a time.

This creates a pathognomic effect as he travels up and down the body and face to understand the event. The device sets up an interesting sequence between identity, motion, and emotion. The carefully scanning eyes behind the pinhole represent the motion of emotion. This moves beyond physiognomy and, because of the abstracted views of the scene, map the subtle movements of sensation and passion. The dilation of pupils before a scream. The flinch of rape.

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----Unfold the crease and then, inverse fold the Mountain fold edges----

Folding Film: Man, Woman & Camera 00:55:12

The husband follows his wife through a torrential downpour down the alley ways of Tokyo. They both move through the streets shielded from the rain by their umbrellas. The woman stops at a dead end in a vacant alleyway. The husband stops just out of range watching her. She pauses and drops her purse and finally her umbrella. A black car speeds by and halts in front of her. She begins to run her fingers through her hair, and down her neck.

The scene flashes into white light, igniting the dark alleyway.

The man watches as a camera snaps photographs through the windshield of the black car. She pulls out a remote to a vibrator she has position between her legs and turns it up, keeling her over onto the flooded streets. The camera flash pulses through the streets. With every shutter snap the film’s camera moves be-tween husband, woman, and camera. The flashes quicken into a rapid frequency as she removes her clothes. Rain still devours the scene.

The man watches as his wife screams and throws her cloths, still staring directly at the camera photographing her. He drops his umbrella and begins to masturbate.

The pace quickens into a seizure of screams, masturbation, camera flashes and rain. Climax. The man, woman, and camera collapse.

There is a long pause between the three of them before she rises and faces the photographer who picks up a smaller camera and calmly snaps photographs.

The film erupts in a love triangle between man, woman, and camera. The rain amplifies the sexual frustration throughout the film and this scene displays all of the perspectives of the film into one single event and space. Each character becomes a voyeur of another, as well as a voyager traveling through the emotions of another. The rainy city of Tokyo in the month of June becomes a space for this interaction, in the dead end of an alleyway. The camera evolves throughout the film to become an increasingly aggressive character.

The first scene establishes its presence as a means to record an event. Then the photographs that the camera produced became a personal blackmail to the woman Rinko. They distorted time and revealed her distorted perspective of herself.

Then, the camera became a device that physically connected itself to the man’s face and forced a way of seeing. It manipulated his focus and exposure to the rape performance. In the last scene, the camera becomes an active character that is not only the catalyst for the event, but the camera actually takes pleasure in the act of photographing the woman, making the camera the third in a love triangle.

| Body Obscura |

Cyberflesh and the Digital Parasite

In the future, where is your soul? Stolen, vaporized in nanotechnics. The ultramodern condition slams a hyper-heated critique into vision, telecommercialized retinas lazer-fed on multimedia fallout from an imploded future, image-jammed brains with repeated psycho-killer experiments in non-consensual wetware alteration; crazed AI’ s, replicants, terminators, cyberviruses ... apocalypse market overdrive. Why wait for revelations? Tomorrow has already been cremated. A techno-nihilist scream on fast-feedforward into micro-processed damnation: meat zombies, snuff-sex-industry, artificial personality projections, flat-lining, software ghosts, cyberimmortalism.

A. Gargett

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| Body Obscura |

Cyberflesh and the Digital Parasite

cy•ber- /sy-bur/ n.

cy•borg /sī-bôrg/ n.

flesh /fl sh/ n.

pros•thet•ic /pr s-th t ks/ adj.

a. coined for “electronic” or computer-related counterparts of

a pre-existing product

b. also largely maintains semantic and contextual accuracy, in

that cybernetic denotes control of speech and functional pro- cesses

a. The surface or skin of the human body.

b. The body as opposed to the mind or soul.

c. Sensual appetites. d. In the flesh. In person, alive.

a. A fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limita- tions by mechanical elements built into the body b. a person who is part machine, a robot who is part organic; a robot who has an organic past

1. An artificial device used to replace a missing body

part, such as a limb, tooth, eye, or heart valve.

2. Replacement of a missing body part with such a de vice.

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In today’s migration era, the wearer of the Porte-Parole appears as a prophetic storyteller and a poetic interrupter of the continuity of established life in public space and the dominant culture. This stranger becomes an expert and a virtuoso in the technology and the artistry of speech, equipped to speak better than others who have yet to overcome speechlessness in their encounter with strangers.

Krzysztof Wodiczko

The Mouthpiece

(Porte-Parole) 1993 Designed by Krzysztof Wodiczko, this device is a piece of equipment for strangers, covering the mouth of the wearer like a gag. Installed into the mouthpiece is a video monitor that completely covers the mouth area. The device is also equipped with loudspeakers that “replace the real act of speech with an audiovisual broadcast of prerecorded, edited, electronically perfected and quickly searched statements, questions, answers, stories, etc.” There was an intention to bring viewers in physically closer to the immigrants wearing the mouthpiece.

The liquid-crystal screen, which is no larger than that of the human lips they are projecting, bring viewers in close to witness the moving lips and to hear the audio. “In today’s migration era, the wearer of the Porte-Parole appears as a prophetic storyteller and a poetic interrupter of the continuity of established life in public space and the dominant culture. This stranger becomes an expert and a virtuoso in the technology and the artistry of speech, equipped to speak better than others who have yet to overcome speechlessness in their encounter with strangers.”

Some of the functions of the Mouthpeice include allowing the owner to compose their own prerecorded act of speaking and replay it later at a chosen time or place. This re-enactment reinforces the artistic power of speech and story-telling. The story teller has always been forced to develop an art of speech in order to tell what has usually been untold. The owner becomes an expert in storytelling in the cyberspace era and an “alien who has arrived in a xenophobic land and who looks strangely familiar to us who have yet to overcome out speechlessness in the face of our repressed fears.”10

This xeonophobic prosthetic bonds to the human body and displaces, time, language and the act of speaking. Technology, like the internet, has sandwhiched itself between the two bodies and moderated the way in which they interface. This Mouthpiece is a form of Cyberflesh. A transition of the human body into a cyborglike figure where abilities are stretched beyond their normal limits and a dependecy on this technological device grows into our very social fabric, and the distinctions between native and foreigner individuals.

10. Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles, London, England: MIT press, 1999, 120

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This is Man’s ultimate fighting machine: the synthetic life-form known as Evangelion Unit 01.

Built here in secret, it is Mankind’s last hope.

Ritsuko Akagi

The Neon Genesis Evangelion Gainax 1995

This Japanese anime series begins as an apocalyptic mecha action series which revolves around the efforts by the paramilitary organization Nerv to fight monstrous beings called Angels. The term mecha, is a Japanese term, used as a broad term to classify a genre of anime that involves vehicles, mostly bipedal, that are controlled by a pilot. It usually refers to a futuristic mechanically operated vehicle that takes the shape of the human body, and undertakes human mannerism, swordsmanship, saluting, etc. Mechas are normally used as advanced war machines and often are presented in gladitorial battles with others of its kind. The first mecha-like machines were seen in modern literature as tripods, in H.G. Wells’ infamous War of the Worlds.

These giant mecha machines, called EVAs for short, are piloted by a select few. The EVAs are unable to sync with adults and therefore the pilots are exclusively adolescents. The main protagonist in this series is one of these pilots names Shinji. Events in the series refer to Judeo-Christian symbols from the Book of Genesis and Biblical apocrypha among others. As the series progresses later episodes begin to deconstruct the specific themes and motifs of the mecha genre. The series shifts focus to psychoanalysis of the main characters, who display various emotional problems and mental illnesses. The nature of existence and reality are questioned in a way that lets Evangelion be characterized as “postmodern fantasy”.

The director of the series Hideaki Anno, suffered from clinical depression before he wrote the series. He is said to have included his methods for overcoming the illness into the show.

The story of Evangelion primarily begins in 2000 with the “Second Impact”, a global cataclysm which almost completely destroyed Antarctica and led to the deaths of half the human population of Earth. The Impact is believed by the public at large and even most of Nerv to have been the impact of a meteorite landing in Antarctica, causing devastating tsunamis and a change in the Earth’s axial tilt (leading to global climate change) and subsequent geopolitical unrest, nuclear war (such as the nuking of Tokyo), and general economic distress. Later, Second Impact is revealed to be the result of contact with and experimentation on the first of what are collectively dubbed the Angels: Adam. The experiments were sponsored by the mysterious organization Seele, and carried out by the research organization Gehirn. 11 The EVAs are a complex entity in and of themselves. They are constructed from cloned pieces of the first defeated angel called Adam. The mechanical structure built around it was a way to restrain and control the energy from the cloned angel. However, as the series progresses it reveals an inbalance in the control of these systems, which causes some EVAs to act completely independently of the pilot. There is also a sync percentage in which the pilot becomes one with the machine. In this event the pilot, robot, and angel become one. They become a fourth entity and is completely stable outside of the artificial power system that the EVAs normally are powered by. This “synchronization” between man, machine, and god is a powerful theme throughout the series.

11. Krystian Woznicki, “Towards a Cartography of Japanese Anime Interview with Azuma Hiroki”. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/ nettime-l-9802/msg00101.html. Retrieved 2006-08-15

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Speed Grapher 2005 Kunihisa Sugishima

Speed Grapher is a Japanese anime series released by Gonzo in 2005. The main protagonist in the story is a former war photographer, named Tatsumi Saiga. Taking place in a future setting of Tokyo, an incredible dichotomy exists between the rich and the poor. The wealthy and powerful men of Japan’s upperclass seek needs to satisfy desires and their own personal ambitions.

A secret instition, called the Roppongi Club, is established as an occultist community of the wealthy, submerged beneath the streets of the city of Tokyo.

The series builds a psychological mystery as Tatsumi Saiga becomes the photographer assigned to expose the secret instition.

The protagonist’s camera becomes increasingly significant as our point of view shifts to Tatsumi Saiga’s. A voyeuristic relationship builds between Saiga and the club. The series structures the episodes labeling them as “Shutter 1” etc. Each segment of the series is presented as a photographic journal of the photographer.

The voyeur is exposed when Saiga interrupts a ritual, to snap a photograph of “the goddess.” It is in this moment that the goddess and Tatsumi Saiga share a kiss, and a special ability becomes awakened in the main character. His camera has the power to explode objects when photographed.

The anime focuses on the relationship between the photographer and his camera. A symbiotic relationship manifests itself between the apparatus and the human body. His ability to control his power increases but as a result loses his eyesight. This degredation or decaying of the human body is also seen in Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo, and A snake of June. A supernatural ‘gift’ is given to the protagonist and the conflict between the apparatus/body becomes carefully documented as the series unfolds. The relationship between the viewer and the viewed holds the tension and mystery of the series until it shift between the struggle for sight and photography (to observe, to remember). The photographer is subject to a difficult situation as his passion for photography, has tuned destructive and is consuming his own ability to see. The need to remember and photograph his life only quickens his sight’s termination.

| Voyeur & Voyager |

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Voyeur & Voyager Flaneur

The voyeur, French for “one who looks,” becomes a mode of observation that ultimately structures how people move through cities. The theater types examine the relationship of the voyeur and the voyager, or the act of seeing and being seen. Architecture can be understood as the construction of the conception of boundaries and thresholds. Our perception, and therefore definition, relies on the often gradated and shifting measure of interior and exterior conditions. These interior and exterior conditions generate our definition of boundaries and the relationships to which our inhabitation becomes realized. It is important to understand our definition as we understand our cities, as a constant flux and evolution that perpetually defines and redefines itself. With this in mind, the city is truly understood in motion, while traversing its spaces, accommodating to the rhythm of its growth and meaning.

Travel becomes the means in which to experience space and understand its relative relationships between interior and exterior.

This situation ultimately defines the idea of the voyeur which becomes a mode and speed in which to experience space.

Beatriz Colomina explains how this shifting flux of events occurs throughout our technological means. “With modernity there is a shift in these relationships, a displacement of the traditional sense of an inside, an enclosed space, established in clear opposition to an outside. All boundaries are now shifting. This shifting becomes manifest everywhere: in the city, of course, but also in all the technologies that define space of the city: the railroad, newspapers, photography, electricity, advertisements, reinforced concrete, glass, the telephone, film, radio,…war.” 12

12 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, London: MIT press, 1994, 26

The voyeur and voyager are general terms of inhabitation, observation, and experience. The idea of the flaneur and ‘The box man’ exist as ideas that culminate from architectural situations and ultimately affect the way a city is traversed which redefines the city and the architecture that generated it.

In the bustling streets of 19th century Paris, construction began between the city streets. Iron and glass covered “arcades” were constructed overhead created an interior condition of a once exterior street space. The roles of the merchant and customer and urban observer began to become realized and redefined with this architecture installation changing the streetscape into an urban corridor.

Walter Benjamin used the idea of the flaneur as a lifestyle and analytical tool in his “Arcades Project.” Benjamin describes the flaneur as “a product of Modern Life and Industrial Revolution without precedent, a parallel to the advent of the tourist.” The flaneur, French for a floater, stroller, or wanderer, becomes a realized momentum of observing and experiencing a city. The flaneur exists between the roles of merchant and customer, and becomes a voyeur of the events taking place through the city. The iron and glass addition overhead generated a new way of traversing the space and ultimately a new perception of interior and exterior.

Arcades

Paris, France

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The Box Man Kobo Abe

Kobo Abe’s novel “The Box Man” reveals a unique way of inhabiting and traversing the city of Tokyo. The main character decides to reside within a cardboard box that has been modified as a dwelling.

The Box itself has careful measurements and dimensions that suit the inhabitants view and mobility with the box; A slit carefully cut for seeing, reinforced with tape to fight against moisture, and hooks for storage. Ultimately the character becomes a critique on the city and the way people move through it. One of the driving intentions of the box man is to blend into the city, a standardized, unmarked box is perfect to camouflage oneself into the backdrop and the city and its familiar debris.

The box man is living inside a pinhole camera. His body has become his dwelling, his dwelling has become his body. He is the ultimate voyeur traversing the city, photographing the city through the tiny hole cut into one side, and the film is a pair of unflinching eyes. This mode of voyeurism transforms the box man into the cityscape and allows for the box man to live outside its inhabitants but still be mobile through the city. This event is one of the voyeuristic conditions established in the theater typologies.

The project founds its voyeuristic settings based upon the idea of the box man as hidden from view in plain sight. Even as the story progresses, the knowledge of the box man’s presence becomes overwhelming for some individuals because of this voyeuristic “stare” and unknown viewer. The individual interfaces the city through another space, the box. The theaters constructed within

the virtual environment use this type of relationship of seeing and being seen. It is also important to realize the subjective nature of the box man, who becomes faceless and anonymous, but witnesses the city through a rather small aperture focusing only on the city floor terrain, there becomes no reason for the box man to look up.

The box man is crouching, and sitting, and scuffling across the floor of the city, and the Tokyo skyscrapers become nonexistent to the box man. He is observing an entirely different Tokyo. Much like the flaneur, the box man exists between and outside of the explicit urban setting.13 The Box man becomes manifested within the project as a viewing situation that conceals the viewer (or box inhabitant). This is unlike the flaneur, which operates between and among the momentum of the public and simultaneously as a voyeur of that momentum. Ideas of inhabitation of space become stretched and questioned. Public and private spaces begin to overlap and create new dimensions and boundaries. The project exhibits these differing modes of inhabitation within the Architecture Atrium. There is an important dialogue between the existing space and its new designed function.

The flaneur operated within the space whereas the Box Man became, to a degree, displaced from the context.

13 Kobo Abe, The Box Man, New York, Random House Inc, 1974, 4

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The Panopticon Jeremy Bentham

The Panopticon is a concept designed prison that allows virtually one observer to see all the prisoners within their cells from one fixed position. Jeremy Bentham has constructed this idea and this structure stating that the prison is, “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

The construction generates the presence of an observer to those incarcerated, creating the feeling of being viewed and watched without the presence of an actual viewer. The cells are located in a circle that radiate from a fixed point where a viewing tower is constructed in the center. Ultimately, privacy is lost among the inmates and therefore their behavior is greatly affected. This prison situation expresses an example were public and private spaces are heavily distinguished and designed for. The prison guards attendance isn’t even necessary to produce the effect of a presence.

The project utilizes this spatial situation to construct a multifaceted position of observation were one single person essentially becomes privy to all the information provided. It becomes an information overload as all the perspective vanish into the same point creating an impossible omniscience of perspective and information.

The Architecture Atrium was originally designed to be placed next to a sinkhole. The structure radiated around a fixed point that was once centered on the sinkhole. The building since then has been displaced and moved to surround one of the many lawns on campus. The resulting structure reveals a semi-circular glass

structure that overlooks the foot traffic of the University. This building created a natural context similar to that of the Panopticon which also operated around a central point.

A similar situation has arisen in that, each individual classroom can be viewed from standing on the lawn. The inhabitants of the classroom share their space and allow the students outside to become viewers of their studio and work.

This project reinterprets this architectural situation as a prisonerguard relationship like that within the Panopticon. The presence of being watched is always there despite any students’ actual attendance.

The culmination of these ideas were generated into a short animation film that could adequately express time and movement through the Architecture Atrium structure. The glass curtain wall system was used as a series of multiple screens that revealed yet another perspective of traversing through the Atrium that was present earlier in the film. This expresses a manipulation in time and in perspective. The viewer is watching a film where screens are superimposed onto architecture revealing multiple screens of previously viewed footage. The spatial relationship is also mimicking that of the Panopticon, where one camera/viewer sees multiple scenes at once, presented in a semi-circle.

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Virtual Campus Voyeurism

The digital flaneur and the cyber-box man

Theaters are constructed around the various forms of voyeurism.

The urban environment generates these complex relationships of voyeur and voyager. The research gathered includes architectural drawings and spatial sketches that provide a precedent for how these situations are constructed. The existing theater types as well are carefully understood in terms of their relationship to audience and performance.

These forces drive the architectural intentions of rooms, spaces, theaters, and cities. Our perception of space is ultimately based upon these associations and relationships between part to whole, public and privacy, voyeur and voyager. The three virtually constructed theaters provide an explicit spatial setting to contain and generate the examined voyeuristic types. This mode of observation and construction establishes a method of creating based upon the relationships within densely inhabited urban settings. Second Life allows the input of avatars and ultimately the inhabitation of these spaces to occur. The theater spaces react to the constraints of the virtual environment, such as field of vision, weightlessness, interactivity, etc. This re-imagines the city as a virtual environment and enables a budget-less freedom of spatial experimentation to push the idea of the projected image to new innovative extremes.

The teatro Olimpico reveals a situation in which multiple alleyways are constructed into the backdrop of the stage. This creates multiple perspective cones that allow certain members of the audience access to more information about the entrance and exits of characters.

These vanishing corridors also allow the play or performance to

construct around this space and use it as a element to create drama or a fragmentation of information. Some of the audience is able to witness the death of one character, or the secret spying of another, while part of the theater is oblivious. Part of the theater becomes a voyeur within the performance. This idea can be introduced into the setting of the projection of the moving image.

The panopticon prison can be utilized in a different way, where only one viewer is witness to all the information. The relationship becomes one of surveillance. The project would spilt a large screen into multiple sections, resembling that of the cell blocks, and project multiple things at once. The projected image is a slowly traversing perspective moving through various degrees of enclosure or public and private spaces. Each division of the screen will reveal the same film at a different moment in film. Essentially this creates a situation where the viewer is witnessing the Architecture of the filmed structure all at once. Each screens becomes a surveillance perspective moving through the structure. Where is passing out of a space another is entering, looping the entire experience. The theater types becomes a microcosm of Voyeuristic conditions that relate to those forming within the city.

The Architecture Atrium became the context of these experiments and was modeled using 3DS Max. This model was built using architectural drawings to acquire correct dimensions and placement of the structural systems. Generating this virtual model of the space was done prior to establishing the screens and projections that would be used to augment the space

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A short animation film was generated from the rendered environment. This was collected frame by frame and rendered using a concrete texture as the material surface of the Atrium.

The final animation included actual shots of the physical Atrium space that would become spliced in between the virtual rendered shots. Some of these rendered shots became the footage as a projection onto the Architecture Atrium space and other times the projected image became the actual material that the building was constructed in.

The final animation film was a three minute piece revealing the three voyeuristic conditions used as a precedent; the flaneur, the Box Man, and the Panopticon. The Architecture Atrium housed a variety of conditions predisposed to certain types of public and private situations that were draw upon to expresses their inherent voyeurism. The virtual model enabled an efficient system of projections to occur which augmented the virtual space and used the idea of a camera and its projection as a displacement of space and its public/private associations.

The panopticon situation was realized within the curved glass structure of the Architecture atrium and revealed a multi screened semi circular event that mimicked the guard and prisioner relationship with Jeremy Bentahm’s idea of the Panopticon. The Box Man was an event that completely removed the viewer from the actual context and was completely private from the public. The condition of the Box Man manifested itself into a multiscreened structure that completely surrounded the inhabitant and thus the projected image became the actual space instead of a window of view into another segment of the film. The Box Man stood within a series of screens and moved through the space but was in some ways artificially present within the actual space, because his dwelling, or box, became a new skin that embodied a different space. This new space carefully allowed certain views of the space around him, becoming a pseudo architecture that interfaced his body and the space.

The flaneur was manifested into a series of screens that were located along a path. They rested on the columns of the Architectural structure. Each screen played a portion of the entire animation and developed new readings of the space depending upon the perspective, position and movement of the flaneur. This situation was more public than the Box man and operated with the other students and inhabitants of the same space.

The use of screens and projected images displaced areas of ‘real’ and virtual within the architectural model. This idea was then taken further when it was carefully juxtaposed with actual footage of the physical site within the Architectural Atrium. The viewer became voyeur and voyager as moments of perspective alternated between varying degrees of inhabitation. First person perspective was utilized to generate a feeling of subjectivity and individualism when traversing through the structures. This was accomplished also but providing camera shakes, change of pace, hesitation, and the sound of footsteps.

00:02:46:23

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The viewers were forced into a voyeurism when the film saw through the eye of the surveillance camera and scanned the architectural space. The camera then followed an individual and began to multiply his image on the screen. This relates directly to the Panopticon. The camera gives the impression of presence and authority despite the fact that no could be watching. The effect is that this event is being stored and suddenly the present action becomes displaced by the idea that it was be recorded and could be replayed. The film attempts to critique the modern day closed circuit surveillance camera as a Ponopticon-type situation.

This project exposed existing typologies of architecture and technology as a means of blurring the convention between public and private space. Film and animation was used as a medium to establish the movement through these varying definitions of space. The spaces themselves exist within gradients of public and private situations and therefore require the animation to spatially loft their points into a seemless fluidity that connects what was once two differing extremes. Overall I think this was a successful project that experimented between the real and virtual as well as the public and the private

This project uses the idea of the voyeur as a way to negotiate the shifting nature of defining spaces and to also establish this transient act as a system in which to measure the relationship between spaces and how it is being inhabited. The introduction of three-dimensional modeling and the virtual environment has generated new forms of the idea of a “city.� This experiment manifests itself as an explicit spatial relationship of these voyeuristic conditions within the virtual environment, that originally exist within the physical cityscapes. It simultaneously uses existing theater typologies as case studies for their complex situations that define interior/exterior, and the voyeur and the voyager.

The project manifests the three voyeuristic typologies as varying degrees of inhabitation and displacement. The Architecture Atrium at the University of Florida campus was used as a spatial ground zero for these experiments to occur. The reconstructed virtual space allowed these voyeuristic situations to become rooted into a context that both developed and contained these theater type relationships. The Architecture Atrium thus becomes a context of experimentation applying the parameters within the idea of the flaneur, the Box Man, and the Panopticon.

|Orient|ation

Exposing Tradition and Desire Abroad

Hong Kong

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

Calvino “Invisible Cities�

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|Orient|ation

Exposing Tradition and Desire Abroad

Hong Kong can be dissected into a kaleidoscope of advertisements, a medley of street tunes followed quickly by the steel shutters of commerce. Hong Kong is not so much a place as a space of transit.

It is for this reason that the identity of this city is constantly being transformed, redefined, and lost again. Residents become transient migrants simply in a state between where they came from and where they are going. The media saturation changes its inhabitants’ experience of space rendering it abstract, dominated by images and signs in a constant tug for attention that dispels awareness of time, history, and presence. The ground becomes a makeshift foundation, a Pangaea force reproducing and undermining; working as a false reference point. The pyramid becomes the means of transportation, the vessel, while the labyrinth is always elusive and in motion.

This idea of inhabiting the in between points or the edge, gives a systematic glimpse in understanding Hong Kong. The ideal space and the real space become blurred and because of their lack of specificity permit a space for the idea of experiencing, to work beyond conceiving and perceiving.

Within this elusive creature, identity is not fixed and built space is to be understood beyond their objective spatial forms but as a product of this transient anonymity. This is a city of momentum and adaptation. Where local chefs have a knack for throwing their voices directly into your consciousness and outside taxi drivers navigate by use of their horns. A resonant frequency of the city calibrated by the sequence and speed of the visitor. Situational ambiguity dominates the urban space of the city concealing the idea of origin and place.

However it is not enough to determine the identity of this city as simply, one without. “ The pyramid is a substantive; it is proof of architecture’s power and its limitations. It names the entire tradition of architecture, all the recognizable categories and entities and their ‘proper’ concepts, but in a void—the conceptual knowledge of the pyramid can never be positioned or actualized in any concrete way.”

14

14 Bernard Tschumi, The Architectural Paradox, New York, MIT press

The pyramidal existence within Hong Kong is latent, perhaps even fleeting however, its singularity exists outside of physical place and employs an essence that collapses to a point in motion. Just as the idea of site becomes sublimated into the structure of a building so does the residual presence of street markets become self referential in a state of a site redefined. These markets perpetuate exchange but by their very nature of progress and multiplicity ground and fix the idea of the pyramid. “Every city is constructed, made by us, somewhat in the image of the ship Argo, every piece of which was replaced over time but which always remained the Argo, that is, a set of quite legible and identifiable meanings.”15 This analogy begins to characterize how the urban condition can be described as a linguistic model based upon signifiers and signified. However, more importantly, it points out that the erosion of the degrees to which they correspond are not negated by their elaboration of its origin. This correlates to the idea of site and context.

The native street markets in Hong Kong don’t exist within the conditions established from the context, nor do they aim to. They exist beyond these conditions. Simply by opposing this ‘yielding to contextualism’ they have redefined and elaborated on its meaning.

It becomes an interpretative mechanism.

The momentum in this redefinition is again reached in the very conception and nature of these spaces. The pyramidal existence once again becomes realized as part of the engine that fuels the labyrinth. Its existence is dependent upon the link between the pyramids. Their significance and meaning is based out of the relationship between each other. “It was argued from a linguistic standpoint that architectural objects have no inherent meaning, but can develop through cultural convention.”16 Because of their self referential nature they become a cultural artifact based on conventions continually justifying the labyrinth. The manifestation of this pyramid provides that the transient nature of the labyrinth is both part and parcel of this original energy, existing as a temporal expression of its urban code. “…an act of knowledge of the context that comes out of its architectural modification.” 17

15 Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, Univ. of California Press, 1997, 54 16 Kate, Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, 186 17 Vittorio Gregotti, Addressing New York Architectural League, New York, Abe Books, 1998, 243

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The image becomes more than a facade, it becomes real.

Anonymous Hong Kong

Oscillating in a hypertext labyrinth

The projected occupant of Hong Kong is forced to silence any questions of meaning and purpose to finally spontaneously internalize the city. The awareness of the city’s subject is called into question. Subtleties become overwhelming and the layers and density of the city strengthen the idea of narrative because of the individuals need for a selection process. This begins to unfold the subjectivity of experiencing the city. The peculiar realities of experiencing Hong Kong’s urban space become a subconscious time warp. It exists as a lapsing episodic system. The episodic memory is of autobiographical events which are composed of times, places, and other associated emotions. The inhabitant experiences the city through their semantic memory in tandem with their episodic memory. They recall the memory of meanings, understanding, and concept based knowledge outside of specific experiences. This conscious recollection of the factual information and general knowledge about the city is independent of context and personal relevance.

In this ego-less labyrinth of devolving impulsory sensations the subject is conditioning perception. The labyrinth shows itself as a slow history of space. One can only participate in and share the fundamentals of the labyrinth, but one’s perception is only part of the labyrinth as it manifests itself. The invisible city exposed and disappearing behind all our categorizations. The superabundant information canopy is experienced visually and allegorically. It provokes this sense of narrative which in turn produces the false sense of identity. The unfamiliar is no longer a sensual element within the familiar. Freud speaks of the uncanny as the rediscovery of something familiar, that has been repressed. The uncanny is felt as the presence of an absence. Without this sublime structure the

human body would be incomplete. “The body is disintegration is in a very real sense the image of the notion of the humanist progress in disarray.”18 Vidler also mentions the importance in discovering the power in interpreting the relations between the ‘psyche and house, the body and the house, the individual and the metropolis.

Media saturation prevents image and meaning to coexist. The image becomes imbedded in the architecture of the city. Meaning becomes lost with the idea of securing clarity of the marketing image or of this idea of a projected imagined life. “The theme of image is seized for its ability to represent and communicate, rather then for its attempts at establishing foundation.

The word ‘image’ commonly refers to that part of a thing person, or action that appears to others, rather than to the subject that the image constructs or the method of its construction.”19 The image becomes more than a façade, it becomes real. Communication drives the image however it becomes vacant of any real meaning.

The communication gesture transforms context of thinking, to merely interplay with the process or idea.

18 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, New York, MIT press, 1982, 86 19 Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture, New York, MIT press, 1992, 15

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Hypertext Hypertext transcends time and place. This idea of hypertext represents a relatively new innovation in user interfaces, which overcome the limitations of traditional text. The creation of this type of writing/information is that it is simultaneously an object and an action. Instead of being a static textual artifact the text is a perpetual activity which is continually undergoing change. The city begins to go beyond just image and becomes an interactive experience. The time delay between perception and conception becomes violated and canceled out by instantaneous electric media. There is a like for the time required for imagination to unfold and to oscillate, also to conceive the minor shift of limit and meaning that makes it capable to understand this city. Instant gratification and seemingly endless information blur between architecture and image.

The reader or experiencer of the city speeds up and slows down an occasionally stops. Hong Kong however manifests a constant current and energy that begins to pull that subject into its very rhythm and momentum. “…by bestowing on the information media an importance great enough to allow construction of projects loaded primarily with the weight of their role as illustration. This gives the printed and transmitted photographic image a decisive role in judgment, and shifts the much more complex and structural notion of form, with all its reasons and resistances in the direction of decoration, atmosphere, and syllogism.” New interfaces of the city bring another dimension to the idea of image. The unfamiliar is no longer a tantalizing anticipation and virtually all the perspectives of the city are offered to be experienced at once or simultaneously.

The idea of the uncanny or unfamiliar is called into question. The subjects’ memory and desire become one, just as the city forces a

violent dichotomy of Eastern and Western cultures. The subjects’ memory and desire become one, just as the city forces a violent dichotomy of Eastern and Western cultures.

Hong Kong is an East-West city; A combination of both modernity and tradition. This juxtaposition also exists as an architectural struggle within the city itself. Domestic market signifying the memory of tradition becomes a residue that works along the ground level of the ever-promising urban business structures. Although the domestic markets are being pushed around and forced to relocate in reaction to the newer skyscrapers, there still exists a fundamental link to the original image.

The idea of exchange still flourishes within Hong Kong. The impermanence of the city, the migrant movement, and momentum of progress becomes the linking thread that can be associated with the connection to the original concept of the original. “ It is a constructive activity. Architecture, by its very creation is institutionalizing. So for architecture to be, it must resist what it must in fact do. In order to be, it must always resist being. It must dislocate without destroying its own being, that is, it must maintain its won metaphysic. This is the paradox of architecture.”20 Hong Kong begins to dislocate tradition and its interpretation. There exists a relationship between the sign and what it stands for. Their becomes an accumulated meaning, that relates in concept back to the original image.

20 Vittorio Gregotti, Addressing New York Architectural League, New York, Abe Books, 1998, 243

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The architectural ‘plan’ of Hong Kong operates as spatially organizing the subject. As the city becomes more developed and progress continues, the plan becomes increasingly irrelevant. The plan originally moves the collective mind and body. “Plans have been scrutinized for characteristics that could provide the preconditions for the way people occupy space, on the assumption that buildings accommodate what pictures illustrate and what words describe the field of human relationships.” Hong Kong however has exploded sectionally and altered significantly the original plan of the city. The introduction of urban escalators and pedestrian foot bridges have created new and sometimes unforeseen access that link spaces. The site of Hong Kong also drives this sectional shift. Hong Kong site on a mountain that slopes down to sea level. The displacement of the inhabitant from the ground creates a new dimensional significance that relies on section. The plan doesn’t allow for the perception of how the space is inhabited. Since narrative and individual perception seems to dominate how to understand Hong Kong it is natural that section would become an increasingly significant way to view the city.

The plan would simply represent a distorted view of a portion of how the city would be organized. Perceiving the city through section would be more accurate in understanding how the traditional buildings exist and how intervention has come to intersect and alter the original spaces. The architecture of Hong Kong conditions the citizens or migrants of city and engages how they live. The proposed life that is imagined and expressed and the desire of the city forces

itself of the inhabitants. The idea of occupation occurs in tandem with Hong Kong’s momentum of exchange. This creates the possibility of social interaction. The formation of the city established this occupation which becomes a collective act, rather than an individual act. The image, as discussed previously, creates the stage of social life.

It perpetuates the individual identity and satisfaction of the individual subject. The city’s identity has a whole becomes sacrificed because of its inability to be characterized or defined. This increasing ambiguity is the source of the disappearance of the identity of Hong Kong.

Perhaps the only true identity of this city is that it has no identity and that it is always in motion and defining and redefining itself.

The idea of exchange, like taking a breath, is the constant circulation between giving and taking. The metabolism of the city inhales oxygen, like it utilizes its own tradition, but through it’s own process exhales something new, something different. The city lives on tradition but produces something else. Not necessarily foreign to the original intake but transformed.

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The idea of situation occurs when the observer becomes removed from an observed reality. When awareness of your physical body becomes a hologram, the city delivers, broadcasted in a thousand tiny firefly lights, a version of a new reality. Leaving behind a physical, material world you also begin to lose yourself and ultimately recover this option of inner-silence. Of course, until the screaming of underground glass from an MTR line dismantles all thought leaving, only for a second, your own personal void. And in this static of indecision, you quickly succumb unconsciously to the momentum and fluidity of this city. One becomes undifferentiated tissue. The subject becomes a projected occupant existing in this fluid current.

The constant traveler is continually undergoing change. The city becomes simultaneously an object and an action. The movement from the ground creates this idea of sectional vertigo. Intervention takes control and original building and form is being overcome by access and advertisement. The reference point of ground becomes ambiguous and thus a seamless overlap occurs. The narrative of the subject traveling through the city remains in a constant state of disorientation. Only the awareness of the whole system of the narrative being pieced together realizes this ambiguous fluctuation of meaning and reference point. This reaction can be linked to Freud’s uncanny. The presence of an absence indicates to the subject the sublime recollection that becomes formulated by their subjective sequence. The pyramid is lost and is authenticated only by a sequence of perceptions or experiences. The situation manifests itself. Subterranean navigation further blurs the separation of ground and grants another method to observing and understanding this city.

Situational ambiguity -> sectional vertigo, subterranean navigation.

A constant traveler.

Kyoto

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Katsura Rikyu - Imperial Japanese Villa Prince Toshihito 16th Centutry

Balancing Tradition and Desire

The Katsura Rikyu stands as a pivotal monument to the altering trends of the Japanese tradition during the 17th century. Positioned outside of Japan’s Kyoto on the Katsura River, stands this imperial villa as an example of Zen Buddhist architecture.21 It also exists as an architectural exhibit to the tension of the times between the plebian and aristocratic lifestyles. The central idea of analyzing this villa identifies methods of design and how this building transcends two differing time periods, while managing to capture and express the traditional Japanese values and concepts of the designer who pioneered new and experimental ways of garden design. The initial intention of the Katsura Palace was built with the objective as being a retreat for contemplation for the Prince Toshihito. Through the inner contemplation of nature, arose the concept of interconnectedness between interior and exterior spaces. The Katsura Rikyu upholds a constant balance between the differing social and cultural influences of the time, while sustaining the concepts of the Japanese love of nature perpetuating an archetypal design that combines both technical and aesthetic function. I chose to analyze this Imperial Villa because it illustrates the conflicting states of mind and historical tensions during the 17th century and marks a change toward rationalism that has become a reference point for contemporary Japanese architecture used today.

The design intentions of the Katsura Rikyu extend to not only uphold the Japanese traditions but to create something new in the process.

Prince Toshihito planned to embody an idea of refinement and good tast while exhibiting a simple and rational sense to the building. The villa existed first as a retreat during the summer months. Concepts of moon viewing and tea ceremony then also became part of the Toshihito’s idea of refinement and contemplation. Overall, Prince Toshihito wanted the Imperial Villa to hold qualities that would

encourage harden appreciation while sustaining a functional and relaxing setting. The concepts that existed behind these intentions were to create characteristics of rationality and individuality. A sense of individuality was established throughout the gardens and ultimately connected the functions of the garden and building system of linked parts. These concepts would enchance the idea of linking the interior and exterior spaces while still giving a sense of individuality within the villa. Nature had been intended to be reproduced or mimicked in most gardens of Japan. However, the Katsura Rikyu took guidance from the Zen tea masters to create nature in their own accord, not to simply reproduce it.

The site of the Katsura Rikyu lies along the Katsura River. There are four teahouses: the Geppa-ro, the shokin-tei, the Shokatei, and the Sho-ken. Set in wooded surroundings within the ancient perimeter of the imperial capital of Kyoto, the Rikyu, or separated residence, of the palace is considered the finest product of a secular and unofficial tradition. It was built in the opening decades of the 17th century by Kobori Enshu, tea ceremony master and architect, who sought to express his ideals of rustic simplicity and picturesque nature on a larger scale then had been attempted before. The overall layout of the palace took a considerable amount of attention. Prince Toshihito, whom the site was built for, mapped out the movement of the moon on the site for many months and years before deciding how to situate the buildings. The moon reflection off the pond decided the height of the building. The view of the moon gave a sense of refinement to the site, and became a focal point for nightly meditative practices.

21 Michael Fazio, Buildings Across Time, London, Laurence King Publishing, 2004, 198

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The entire plan has a 20-degree declintation from the East to the South. The imperial Garden was not oriented like the other villas of its time which did not stray for their East-West orthofonal positioning.

This anfle symbolically represented the rebellion that the Katsura Rikyu stood for. It did not completely reject the influences of the time but rather altered them and expounded upon them. This orientation would allow for the perfect view of the harvest moon as reflected off of the pond and into the viewing platform Gepparo. Gepparo meaning “Moon-Wave Tower” was constructed after a poem by Po Chui (772-846) and was placed on an artificial two meter eminence overlooking the pond. It is not only for the viewing of the moon that the Gepparo was positioned this way. The position was also excellent in the daytime because its axial position would see the Shokin-tei on the opposite shore. The Japanese aesthetic was to generate all of the elements of the Japanese garden into a single view. 22 The moon viewing characteristics of this site enable designer Kobori Enshu to give a centerpiece to his idea of contemplation and relaxation. The inhabitatns were meant to gather around as one under the slowly rising moon. Here they would witness the harvest moon peaking above the trees and becoming illuminated and reflected again off of the pond before them. This effect gave a truly spiritual touch to the building and an almost mysterious tone to the site. The simplicity and plainness in its structured seemed all the more overflowing with spirit and energy as it connected with its context.

Underlying the concept of the designer’s personal endeavor was to discover the essential spirit of the tea ceremony. The tea-houses of Katsura Rikyu are structural and formally simplistic. This is based on the Villa createor’s plebein social sense ( as opposed to the sense of the privilege class, that embellished structures with ornate detailing).

His tea houses have a reed thatched roof and others a gabled roog or a hipped gable roof. Natural tress training the bark were used for supports.

22 Kenzo Tange, Katsura, Tradition Creation in Japanese Architecture.

London, Yale University Press, 1972, 234

The walls were made of earth. Some of the floors in the structure were earth and others boarded. Again, boundaries between interior and exterior spaces are linked by the actual materials that resemble the raw textures of nature. Their placement stands to reposition their place and orientation, thus redefining those architectural boundaries and thresholds. This functioned as a spatial joint between the tea houses themselves, which have terraces and porches that extend outward to pull outdoor nature into the interior spaces. Sliding partitions and doors permit rooms to change dimensions and open up to the natural world in varying ways. These modular post beam systems are particuarly an interesting aspect that can accommodate an evolving need within the site. 23 The palace despite ts strict functionalist design, is equipped to move and adapt to the changing needs of the inhabitants. The unique nature of this villa allows for occupants to inhabit the structure through all of the seasons, which is unlike other villas of the time. The ability of sliding partitions enables temperature to be controlled within the tea houses. Ventilation would then be easily controlled during the summering months. The buildings of the Katsura were framed in light timbers, using the triangular truss in the roof, and closed by plain walls, lacking the pillars, brackets, foundation podium and lean-to ambulatory of the Chinese style.

Intimacy, almost too carefully contrived, is the keynote. From the start, the rooms and bays were laid out in multiples of the tatami, or rice-straw mats,used on floors in all classes of domicile for sitting and lying. The windows were placed at eye level when you were sitting on these mats. These rice-straw mats or tatami existed as the proportions by which the entire site plan went by.

These tatami mats were designed to different scales of the body.

Their measurements can be extended from their placement within the buildings and onto the landscape and the garden to show registration of proportions and lines that connect the boundary between interior and exterior spaces.

23 John Norwich Julius, Great Architecture of the World, New York, Random House, 1975, 46

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Sliding partitions and doors permit rooms to change dimensions and open up to the natural world in varying ways. 1 These modular post beam systems are particularly an interesting aspect that can accommodate an evolving need within the site. The palace despite its strict functionalist design, is equipped to move and adapt to the changing needs of the inhabitants. The unique nature of this villa allows for occupants to inhabit the structure through all of the seasons, which is unlike other villas of the time. The ability of sliding partitions enables temperature to be controlled within the tea houses. Ventilation would then be easily controlled during the summering months.24 The buildings of the Katsura were framed in light timbers, using the triangular truss in the roof, and closed by plain walls, lacking the pillars, brackets, foundation podium and lean-to ambulatory of the Chinese style. Intimacy, almost too carefully contrived, is the keynote. From the start, the rooms and bays were laid out in multiples of the tatami, or rice-straw mats, used on floors in all classes of domicile for sitting and lying.2 The windows were placed at eye level when you were sitting on these mats. These rice-straw mats or tatami existed as the proportions by which the entire site plan went by. These tatami mats were designed to different scales of the body. Their measurements can be extended from their placement within the buildings and onto the landscape and the garden to show registration of proportions and lines that connect the boundary between interior and exterior spaces.

The wooden columns within the tea-houses are pierced by horizontal beams creating a roof system that is “hidden.” The tea houses appear to present one pitch and profile on the interior and eave overhang and a steeper one on the exterior. This gentler pitch of the ceiling creates a sense of horizontality to the building. 3 These support beams of the exterior roof are concealed by the ceiling. This is also seen in Buddhist’s architecture/ This “hidden” aspect also contributes to the mystery of the building and a symbolic approach to Enshu’s intentions behind his combining of elements. Not only was the structure itself suggested and implied to form with the surround landscape but also physically within itself there was a vanishing of systems beneath other systems as if mimicking that of nature.

24 Michael Fazio, Buildings Across Time, London, Laurence King Publishing, 2004, 198

The Katsura is said to have derived inspiration from Japanese literature as well. Works such as Tale of Genji, the Poems of Past and Present and the works of Po Chu-i were said to have had some impact on Toshihito. Among the passages from the Tale of Genji in which the following description of a garden occurs: “In the southeast rose a mountain, where all sorts of trees bearing spring flowers had been planted. The pond was excellent and delightful.”

Other features of the poem also make literary allusions to Katsura.

Professor Sutemi Horiguchi has pointed out for example, that a passage in the preface to the Poems of the Past and Presesnt which mentions the pones ofTakasago and Suminoe must be the inspirations for the two large pines on the bank of the Katsura pond. The two trees were thus intended to symbolize the two great poetic works, and the fact that they are places in important central positions indicates how completely Prince Toshihito’s imagination was captured by the charm of the past. This lends to the idea of how the Katsura stands as a rebellion to the shogonate that was beginning to take power in Japan at this time.25 The Katsura went against their aristocratic privileged class sense of culture and wanted to turn more towards the past as seen from the inspiration he derived from the poems and literature.

Again this imperial villa manages to stand as this architectural example of the cultural tensions of the time. The building is constructed with a balancing of the Yayoi principle and the Jomon tradition. The Yayoi principles are described as being dominated by principles of aesthetic balance and continuous sequence of patterns in space. The Jomon tradition is more along the lines of how the rock formations were used in the site as ending points, or centerpieces within a given space or area. More specifically rock shores were extended out into the ponds where lanterns were placed. The function of some of these lanterns and their placement is questionable because lighting in those certain areas are not needed however Enshu seemed to have used their pieces to make a spatial joint with the building and the paths-that-snaked through the site. The balance between aesthetic and technical function take form. In reality these pieces were not standing on their own at all but contributing to the entire fabric of the site and they seemed to continue to register and extend the tatami proportions and design.

25 Kenzo Tange, Katsura, Tradition Creation in Japanese Architecture.

London, Yale University Press, 1972, 234

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The Shoin within the Katsura Palace exhibits contradictions to the tradition of the shinden-zukuri styles, however we have noticed and observed that these contradictions don’t completely stray from this Yayoi principle. This balance that has been so exquisitely reached is both noble and correct. Conflict between these two principles can be found throughout the site of the Katsura Palace. This conflict however is what gives the site its creative tension. It seems more plausible to interpret the dual nature of Katsura as symbolic of the psychological differences between Toshihito and Nakanuma Sakyo, the two men who cooperated in planning the palace but who were separated in a wide gap in social status. The Hein Aristocracy that was governing Japan during the 17th century lacked realism and held a very stagnant approach to nature.

Toshihito attempted to revive the interest in realism and rationality and a new refined view of nature. He strived to not simply repeat the spatial language of nature but to expand upon them and use their qualities to defme the spaces within his site. Again his rebellion for the shogonate shines through. This expresses his motives behind the various qualities of the site including the overall plebian and lower class influence with the unfmished wood planks and the lack or decorative ornaments. However this building is then juxtaposed with the refinement and spiritual tea ceremony and brought to hold spectacles such as a moon-viewing platform. The balance of these two systems is what really pushes this Imperial Villa to become more than its parts.

The site doesn’t ostracize either one of the cultural sides and way of life but rather glorifies both of them by bringing them together and creating something truly glorious and unique. The new creative spirit with which Enshu used in building the Katsura lead to new materials like stone pavement, stone lanterns, and wash basins which did not appear in gardens then. The Katsura Rikyu began with experimentation with square trimming. For most gardens of the era this idea was seen as going against the flow of nature however

like earlier stated the nature was formed to go with the building.

The tree masked most of the views of the tea houses until the last moment. This ensured that the view wouldn’t fall onto the structure until the intended moment at the very end. This gave a very intimate feel to the tea houses and promoted the feeling of relaxation as well as individuality. The houses were adorned with nothing that wasn’t needed as a function of the tea ceremony.

Individuality came from the simplicity of the structure and the winding paths that numerously crossed over water, giving a reflection of the self and a sense of separation from the other areas of the site because of how the landscape closed off certain areas and then opened up others to draw a person through the paths. By becoming surrounded by nature that seemed to extend right into the houses themselves offer a strong sense of contemplation. This method of paying considerable attention to certain elements affect the scale of the body and how this achieved many of his intended many ofhis concepts and intentions. The idea and concept of a garden from later times around the Eighth Century, was to reveal a sense of seasonal beauty, that centering on the living quarters of the building, such as cherry trees planted in the east during spring, and the verdant trees that provide shade in the south during summer, and tinted and slightly faded leaves in the west during autumn.26 Katsura Rikyu was conceptually influenced by this long existing concept but its method of expression is entirely different. Special devices were tried out for all the buildings surrounding the garden, not only in the structural design but also for the azimuth and the handling of the environment. Besides the rationality for use during a specific season, an effort was made so that the special seasonal flavor possessed by each tea-house would be maintained through its functioning in other than a specific season. Consideration was given to imparting the full effect of “seeing and being seen.”

26 John Norwich Julius, Great Architecture of the World, New York, Random House, 1975, 46

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The Shokintei is a conspicuous example of this effect of “seeing and being seen”. The name of this building signifies conceptually that it is placed in the shadowy part of the whole garden. As a tea pavilion, it seems to have a winter character. Taking into account that the use of the entire garden was primarily concentrated in midsummer, the Shokintei was so devised as to impart and contribute to the seasonal feeling of winter, from the viewpoint and perspective of appreciation , even in the summertime. The strategic patterned surface of the flooring of the tatami mats and sliding doors, unfloored veranda, the pebbles strewn and placed around the stepping stones of white granite type, “night rain” sand beach on the shore opposite to the inlet, and the effect of stone lanterns lit at night provide a view marked by a feeling of wintry snow and ice, even in summer. It is also tending to exhibit the same characteristic of a rainy night scene from late autumn to early winter time zone. In order to use the garden at night, thought has been given to the phases ofboth boating and walking.

Many kinds of stone lanterns have been set up to enhance the effect and their arrangement is excellent. For imbedded stepping stones to be laid under the eaves in this way is naturally the idea of bringing inside a path which ordinarily should be outside (in the garden of the tea-house). As a tea-house formalized for u e in the preparation of tea, it was only natural for the pantry and kitchen stove, which are ordinarily set up in the interior, to be taken out under the eaves. This has the character of a tea hermitage in the early period of the green tea ceremony.

The Katsura Rikyu has managed to fulfill many of the varying intentions of its creator. The Imperial villa has stood as a pivotal monument to two differing types of social statuses. The privileged class of the aristocracy and the humble peasant life were two main conflicting interests at the time. The way this building is able to control such opposite ends of the spectrum is truly amazing. Enshu is able to design a site that encompasses a rational, simple way of life physically using bare bark as a texture and yet glorify this simplicity and individuality and juxtapose it with the highest social coloring

of the tea ceremony. Not only is this site in perfect harmony with its lf, as far as the tensions between the two opposing classes go but this site has managed to capture the essence of tradition and a rebellion against the order of the time. All the while moon viewing is still taken into consideration and determines the layout of the gardens.

The gardens themselves were introduced into a new pioneered form that offered an experimentation with their elements.

Appreciation of nature began to be redefmed by this site. No longer were the concepts behind nature those of reproducing and simply retelling the elements that exist within them . Instead a new spatial language was formed that began to extend the interior spaces into the exterior gardens and vice versa. This powerful moment along with the shear rationality in function over form of the site, all contribute to the Japanese contemporary architecture of today. This idea that the form should follow the function marks it as a powerful turning point in architecture toward a realistic and rational design.27 The intensions of the designer were to build a retreat for relaxation and contemplation. He succeeded in creating a world outside of the one that existed in Kyoto, Japan at the time. It welcomed all guest but lent to the idea that true luxury is the ability to fmd oneself and become in touch with your own individuality. I think that this aspect of design can take architecture to another level. To create a space that accommodates the natural energy with the landscape around you and urges you to push deeper within yourself to see more than what is there. The simplicity calms the mind and allows it to dwell in the depths of concepts and ultimately come to a more true understanding of the self. This buildings aims to truly draw a interconnectedness between the opposing social statuses, building and garden, and to one’s own individuality.28

27 Mortimer Wheeler, Temples, Tombs, Palaces & Fortress of Asia, London, Spring Books, 1965 44 28 John Norwich Julius, Great Architecture of the World, New York, Random House, 1975, 46

| Experiments | Framing Fairytales

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| Experiments | Framing Fairytales

The idea of the toy or miniature device intitiates a narrative just by the means of changing its scale and size. The toy becomes a character and because of their size see the world completely different, ie. the sandbox is a desert. There is an element of private discovery of a gigantic landscape. The miniature becomes a physical embodiement of fiction. It is the device of fantasy. This idea was used later in this book in the |Orient|ation chapter when visiting Hong Kong. The depth of field became manipulated via the tiltshift method and causes the entire city of Hong Kong to appear no larger than a train model. The people became caricatures of movement, frozen but placed to appear as if they were moving. This idea of scale is an important contextual reference in understanding narratives, and film.

As seen with Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland, the main character shrinks and grows acouple times before she is the “right” size to continue her journey. The Framing Fairytales experiements looks at some Icelandic etchings and Fairytale prints and deconstructs their single perspective to begin to storyboard a set of sequences. These techniques employ a fragmentation and scale alteration of a single drawing to compose a new reading or perhaps reveal the implicit segments of events that are latent in the image itself.

This fragmentation and scale shift was taken further and reconstructed as sets of points, lines, and planes. This revealed the ‘motion’ within the shirnking and growing of lines and planes.

Zooming in and out was expressed through sets of frames and capture individual characteristcs that change with each successive frame.

The consecutive pages of Experiments include Framing Fairytales, The Digital Narrative, Storyboarding, Blueprinting, Woodblock printing and the pinhole camera.

| Digital Narratives |

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| Digital Narratives | The Digital Narrative experiments with the computer constructed urban spaces. These spaces form situations in which voyeuristc angles and perspectives were explored. They placement of the subject within the cityscape takes precedent from films such as Akira, A snake of June, Tetsuo, and Rear Window. The placement of the camera became an important measurement of the effect of such pyschological characteristics. To spy on a subject offered a carefully set of rules about the placement of such camera in this virtual space.

These experiments are a precursor to the |Voyeur & Voyager| chapter of this book, that reveals a short film animation. The Digital Narrative experiments offer a cinematic structure of frames and perspective in order to build and achieve a specific set of characteristics that tell a story of the cameras relationship to what is being viewed.

The tilting and angling of the camera gave a personal feel to the scene and personified the device viewing as a character. The subtle discrepency of focus, and alignment with the subject gave the impression that the voyeur was searching for the subject through the view finder.

Ultimately the digital narratives experiments explored the nature of telling a story through pure imagery. The digital computer software allowed for multiple variation of shots and scenes that remained, in most cases, still scale-less.

| Story Boarding |

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Story Boarding In the belly of the Urban Machine

The storyboarding writing, began to document the estranged voyager as he roamed a dark fictitious city called Naoko. The name was a hybrid between New York, and Tokyo. It marked an iconic metamorphosis and dystopian infection of the urban condition into the physchological conditions of the protagonist.

The atmosphere grew from the analysis of urban voyeuristic situaitons and the lifestyle of Kobo Abe’s The Box Man. The structure of the writing is organized into a journalistic style of document where his drawings and photographs were recording evidence of something which is unknown to the protagonist.

His journals become a daily routine of seeing and recoding. The writing often expresses a discrepency between the sensations he is feeling and his memory of those sensations. He becomes a voyeur of the other inhabitants of the city as well as with his own body.

The storyboarding technique allowed for a pace to be established between the image and the writing. It poses simultaneous readings of similar imagery as well as creating a juxtaposition between what was shown and what was said. The obscurity in the drawings reflected the suggestiveness of the drawings. The camera becomes an important device in this story as it becomes his ‘truth.’ The idea that machines do not lie becomes reinforced, however as the story progresses this becomes questioned and ultimated exposed as not the case.

The camera is used as a pyschological metaphor to meter the type of perspective the protagonist is undergoing. His ultimate awakening begins as a slow process in which the aperture constricts to allow a larger depth of field. Likewise, the shutter time increase and his body and perception begins to pause, to see what is actually there. The conflict arises in the city’s attempt to pull the protagonist back into the shadows, and obscure truth.

Experiment One: Mind’s Eye 00:00:01 Set the aperture to twenty-two. I want my eye, pinhole to the sun.

Despite the size bury the shutter speed into a full second, be within that infinite tone and focus. An eye unflinching and then never opened again. The glow burned into my chemistry for a lifetime, blind to everything else. Then the white milk sheets will lay flat, this release turning my skyward alittle, the spine of the beast. You catch a moment before you are sucked through the eye of a needle stitching a black funeral garb and washing like oil down the streets of this Dark City. They have turned the soil into exotic nightmare powder, sand grit against the eyes of remembering. Trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death. Alone I walk the streets of Naoko, while submarine echoes navigate through a clumsy city corridor, the desperate sweep of a radar’s search, hearing nothing but his own static, I am taking my own pulse.

Experiment Two: Techo-fetish 00:02:23 Its morning in Naoko and I’m aboard screaming underground glass.

I look around me, empty faces twitching to the frequency of the city.

The space between their static of indecision quickly seccumbs to a fluidity of motion. They are undifferentiated tissue. Anonymous. I cant help but explore the biomechnical nature between the human body and technology....the duality in cantamination between teh bodies reaction to an alien substance. Decaying, bleeding, maggot infested) and the bodies tissue that holds salt and water to corrode the metal and meld the two foreign bodies. My headaches as the metal and glass screams louder. I feel slightly vaporous as I blur into this seizure of symphonies, rythm, and motion. I’m restless and trembling for another dose to unite my every screaming nerve ending into a deafening pulse of pure eecstacy. I’m sustained somehow between surrender and full collapse.

| BluePrinting |

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Together we can turn the world to rust.

Tetsuo

BluePrinting

The Screen and The Image This series of experiments arranges blue-print movie stills that were generated as transfers from the Moviescreen. The movie screen ranges from computer moniters, Laptops, televisions, and flat LCD screens. The High speed diazo paper, or more commonly known as “blueprint paper,” was originally coined this term by architects and engineers who used this process to transfer there schematic drawings. In 1861 Alphonse Louis Poitevin, a french chemist, found that ferro-gallate in gum is light sensitive. Light turns this to an insoluble permanent blue. A coating of this chemical on a paper or other base may be used to reproduce an image from a translucent document.

The ferro-gallate is coated onto a paper from aqueous solution and dried. The coating is yellow. In darkness it is stable for up to three days. It is clamped under glass and a light transmitting document in a daylight exposure frame, which is similar to a picture frame. The frame is put out into daylight requiring a minute or two under a bright sun or about ten times this under an overcast sky. Where ultra-violet light is transmitted the coating converts to a stable blue or black dye. The image can be seen forming, when a strong image is seen the frame is brought indoors and the unconverted coating, under the original image, is washed away. The paper is then dried.

These experiments use the source of the illuminated movie screen as the light source, instead of the sun. This is a dramatic difference in the amount of light that the paper receives. Long

exposures ranging from 20 minutes to a few hours, were used to burn the image into the blueprint paper. The paper was then developed in the fumes of amonia. The paper hovered over the liquid ammonia until the yellows turns blue and the image became visible.

These experiments relate back to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs that captured the inside of movie theaters while the film was playing. The result of his photographs revealed the architectural frame of the movie screen that was lit only by the long exposure of a two hour movie. These blueprint experiments catelogue the variety of screens, and devices that produce images. The pulse of old image monitor blurred the images vertically. The LCD screen revealed pixel like mosaics in their construction of images. The dark blacks of the film on Laptop screens turned out to be an illuminated black that would also expose itself over time.

The technological devices in which we view film is altered by the screen in which we view it through. The transitions between scenes and overall visual tones of the image itself are constructed differently by each new apparatus. Thus, the film experience becomes very different to each individual experience, as size, shape, light, and transition of that light are never the same. This corresponds to Sugimoto’s photographs that tell a different story depending on the architectural context that the film is presented within.

| Wood Block Printing |

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Wood Block Printing Layers of Time and Paint

Wood block printing experiments with wood cut etchings in basswood and occasional linoleum substiture. The series focuses on the constructiong and nature of point, line, plane and tone. Depth is created through the layering of colors and the multiplicity of presses with the carved plate. These plates and their relief of transferred paint, correspond to the readings of different fairytales and narratives researched. Narrative refers to both the story, what is told, and the means of telling. This implies both the product and the process, teh form and the formation.

Each of these wood block prints respond to ‘spatial narrative’ situations acquired from research.

Certain plot archetypes such as good versus evil, etc. begin to construct timeless diagrams that structure many fairy tales and stories. In some cases a ‘full circling’ effect is used when a father figure goes missing as at the begininng of the story and at the end a son is born. These archetypes provide a relationship between characters, plot, and setting. The wood block prints address these relationships and constructs the story into a single frame where time and transition become an implied force seen through the techniques of how the paint was layered, carves, overlapped and mixed.

This technique is a multiplexing of time, and is particulatry cinematic. It involves the weaving of numerous segments of events and allow the viewer to see multiple situations at once and the sequences compressed into one perspective.

| Pinhole Camera |

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Pinhole Camera Painting with Light

The pinhole camera is an optical device that projects an image of it surroundings onto a screen or film plane. Occasionally, like the camera obscura, it could be used for drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photogrpahy. As a pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but th projected image becomes dimmer. With too small a pinhole sharpness again becomes worse due to diffreaction.

Somepractical pinhole cameras use a lens rather than a pinhole because it allos a larger aprture, giving a usuable brightness while maintaing focus.

A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture, effectively a light proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. The pupil in a human eye that is in bright light acts similarly, as do cameras using small apertures. Up to a certain point, the smaller the hols, the shatper the image, but the dimmer the projected image. Optimally, the size of the aperture should be 1/100 or less of the distance between it and the projected image.

A pinhole’s camera shutter is usually manually opertated because of the lengthy exposure times, and consists of a flap of some light proof material to conver and uncover the pinhole. Typical exposures range from 5 seconds to 5 hours to 5 days. These experiments reveal the first tests with a constructed pinhole camera. In most cases exposure averaged around two-three minutes. Different materials were used to mask and dodge within the camera apparatus itself, this resulted in ‘painting with light,’ as colors refracted, and reflected and scenes were masked by shapes.

| Campus Obscura | Camera Obscura Water Lens Chamber of Light Plaza of the Cameras Cinerama

I have just completed a fourty-two-day voyage around my room. The fascinating observations I made and the endless pleasures I experienced along the way made me wish to share my travels with the public. . . . Be so good as to accompany me on my voyage. . . . When traveling in my room, I rarely follow a straight line.

Xavier de Maistre, Voyage around My Room

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| Campus Obscura |

-Camera Obscura

-Water Lens

-Chamber of Light

-Plaza of the Cameras -Cinerama

tra·verse /tra-vers/ v.

a : to go against or act in opposition to

b : To travel or pass across, over, or through c : To look over carefully; examine

map /mæp/ v.

a : To explore or make a survey

b : To plan or delineate, especially in detail; arrange c : To locate

Campus Obscura begins by mapping an itinerary through the University of Florida’s Campus. This path has been frequented by an estranged voyager over the course of several years. The itinerary is taken by foot, and organizes itself against several defining features of the campus. The voyager on this path, begins at his dwelling, courses through the University of Florida’s campus and ultimately ends along the banks of Lake Alice.

Under a veil of fog, our voyager starts his journey. Morning has yet to wake, and an eerie twilight of silence hovers around his body. A pounding heartbeat fills the space. He walks. Leaving his domiscile his body floats in a vaporous cloud. A grey sheet encases him, until he is finally visited by shadows of ghosts from a faded photograph. Taking out his tripod, he positions his pinhole camera.

Still encompassed by a cacoon of vapor and toneless grey, he aims the aperture into the abyss. His eyes are closed. He knows this space.

Familiar with its distance, light, and time. He maps it everyday little by little, cognitively rebuilding it in his mind, drawings its edges with each foot step, traversing through his photographs.

The shutter is removed...revealing an unflinching dark eye. His eyes are still closed. A deafening pulse of pure grey confronts the aperture, motionless, depthless. Somewhere a tree whispers until it too succumbs to the stillness. The dark eye stares. Cold and frozen, nothing jerked, flinched, wavered or grew, no perceptable swelling. locked in a complete pause, poised to shatter.

Then a dark form begins to rise to the surface. The light starts to melt, coalesce, and shift. A breeze of time reveals spectrums of tones, locating and defining themselves as shapes, forms, and colors. A tree trunk approaches as the sidewalk edge runs away from the tripod. Then a light post is revealed just beyond the tree, and a layer of fallen leaves comes into focus. The sky is visible as a solid grey tone, just as the shutter falls swiftly back over the dark grey eye capturing the scene on a thin layer of emulsion.

The voyager carefully folds his tripod and ventures on . . .

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Traversing the Campus Obscura Campus Obscura begins by mapping an itinerary through the University of Florida’s Campus. Positioned along this path are six installations called Vehicles of Shadow. Each Vehicle is responsible for a specific camera type and contextual response to the Campus site. The path begins at the estranged voyager dwelling located on the east side of the map.

The intinerary (denoted as red line) traverses west through the campus, around a soccer field, under a tunnel, along the contours of a sinkhole. Century Tower, located in the middle of campus, is used a focal reference point for orientation within campus.

The vehicles transport individuals view light and shadow.

They each exhibit a form of projected light which references, flashbacks, and montages scenes from around Campus. In some cases they are re-orientation devices. They displace scenes and often, using the mechanics of the camera, see the campus in a new perspective.

Located as a hinge point in the center of the intinerary is the plaza of the cameras which montages a variety of images in an underground cosmorama.

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| Campus Obscura |

1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6|

Camera Obscura Water Lens Chamber of Light Plaza of the Cameras Cinerama Double Slit

| Camera Obscura |

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| Camera Obscura | Pinhole Photography : Scale of the Body

The camera obscura (Latin; “camera” is a “vaulted chamber/ room” + “obscura” means “dark”= “darkened chamber/ room”) is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation.

Using mirrors, as in the 18th century overhead version (illustrated in the History section below), it is possible to project a right-side-up image. Another more portable type is a box with an angled mirror projecting onto tracing paper placed on the glass top, the image being upright as viewed from the back.

As a pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but the projected image becomes dimmer. With too small a pinhole the sharpness again becomes worse due to diffraction. Some practical camera obscuras use a lens rather than a pinhole because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus.

A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture — effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. The human eye in bright light acts similarly, as do cameras using small apertures. Up to a certain point, the smaller the hole, the sharper the image, but the dimmer the projected image. Optimally, the size of the aperture should be 1/100 or less of the distance between it and the projected image.

A pinhole camera’s shutter is usually manually operated because of the lengthy exposure times, and consists of a flap of some light-proof material to cover and uncover the pinhole. Typical exposures range from 5 seconds t hours and sometimes days.

This project takes place inside a dwelling. It turns the living quarters into a camera obscura that houses the projection of the adjacent apartment complex. The image is inverted and projects the parking lot onto to ceiling of the apartment.

The aperture was then manipulated to reveal a variety of interesting results and light play. The mechanics and shadows of light were manipulated and constrolled real time at the scale of the human body.

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Dwelling of estranged Voyager

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Variable Apertures

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Taxonomy of Light

| Water Lens |

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A photogram is a photographic image made without camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The result is a negative shadow image varying in tone, depending on the transparency of the objects used. Areas of the paper that have received no light appear white; those exposed through transparent or semi-transparent objects appear grey.

Artistic cameraless photography, as the technique producing photograms is usually known, is perhaps most prominently associated with Man Ray and his exploration of rayographs.

Others who have experimented with the technique include László Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad (who called them “Schadographs”), Imogen Cunningham and even Pablo Picasso.Varieties of the technique have also been used for scientific and other purposes.

Some of the first known photographic images made were photograms. William Henry Fox Talbot called these photogenic drawings, which he made by placing leaves and pieces of material onto sensitised paper, then leaving them outdoors on a sunny day to expose, making an overall dark background and a white outline of the object used.

From 1843, Anna Atkins produced British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in installments, the first book illustrated with photographs. The images were exclusively photograms

of botanical specimens. Atkins used Sir John Herschel’s cyanotype process, which yields blue images. This unique book can be seen in the National Media Museum in Bradford, England.Photograms were used in the 20th Century by a number of photographers, particularly Man Ray, who called them “rayographs”. His style included capitalizing on the stark and unexpected effects of negative imaging, unusual juxtapositions of identifiable objects (such as spoons and pearl necklaces), varying the exposure time given to different objects within a single image, and moving objects as they were exposed.

Like all photographic processes, photograms require light.

The most commonly used source of light for this purpose is the enlarger used in co ventional negative printing, but any light source can be used. The figure on the right shows how the image is formed. In the traditional darkroom setting, the paper is held in place using a printing frame. The objects to be used in making the image are placed on top of the paper.

When a suitable composition has been found, the enlarger is used to expose the paper (tests will have to be done to check the exposure time and aperture required). Finally, the paper is processed, as normal, in print-developing chemicals, and washed and dried

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Vertical Gradients & Shadows

235

An enlarger is a specialized transparency projector used to produce photographic prints from film or glass negatives using the gelatin-silver process, or transparencies. All enlargers consist of a light source, normally an incandescent light bulb, a holder for the negative or transparency, and a specialised lens for projection. The light passes through a film holder, which holds a photographic negative or transparency, having been previously exposed in a camera and developed.

Prints made with an enlarger are called enlargements. Typically, enlargers are used in a darkroom, an enclosed space from which extraneous light may be excluded; some commercial enlargers have an integral dark box so that they can be used in a light-filled room.

Condenser & Diffuser A condenser enlarger consists of a light source, a condensing lens, a holder for the negative and a projecting lens. The condenser provides even illumination to the negative beneath it. A diffuser enlarger’s light source is diffused by translucent glass or plastic, providing even illumination for the film.

Condenser enlargers produce higher contrast than diffusers because light is scattered from its path by the negative’s image silver; this is called the Callier Effect. The condenser’s increased contrast emphasises any negative defects, such as dirt and scratches, and image grain.

Diffuser enlargers produce an image of the same contrast as a contact print from the negative. Dedicated color enlargers contain an adjustable filter mechanism between the light source and the negative, enabling the user to control the amount of cyan, magenta and yellow light reaching the negative. Other models have a drawer where cut filters can be inserted into the light path. These enlargers can also be used with variablecontrast monochrome papers. Digital enlargers project an image from an LCD screen at the film plane, to produce a photographic enlargement from a digital file.

It was known at that time that various chemicals reacted to light and were hardened and made insoluble and so a suitable sensitized varnish would be hardened in the lightest areas [4].

This meant that if the unhardened varnish could be removed, baring the metal which could then be etched and printed in intaglio, he would have a means of simultaneously mirroring the camera obscura picture and producing a positive and permanent ink image [6]. Niépce had his first success in 1822 with bitumen of Judea mixed with oil of lavender, exposed for several hours under an engraving which was oiled to make it transparent. The areas not exposed to light could be washed away with turpentine and oil of lavender, and the dark areas etched in acid. In 1826 he produced a pewter printing plate of the Cardinal d’Amboise - the first successful attempt at photomechanical reproduction.

In the same year, using his ‘heliographic’ process, he produced a photograph from nature - a view from his window - which required an exposure of eight hours in a camera obscura.

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| Cosmorama |

Plaza of the Cameras

253

A cosmorama is an exhibition of perspective pictures of different places in the world, usually world landmarks or focal points of travel. Careful illumination and lenses are used to give the images greater realism. Cosmorama was also the name of an entertainment in the 19th century london, at which the public could view scenes of distant lands and exotic subjects through optical devices that magnified the pictures. Cosmorama is also considered an exhibition in which a series of view in various parts of the world are seen reflected by mirrors through a series of lenses, with such illumination.

Montage is a technique in film editing in which a series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information. It is usually used to suggest the passage of time, rather than to create symbolic meaning as it does in Soviet montage theory. From the 1930s to the 1950s, montage sequences often combined numerous short shots with special optical effects (fades, dissolves, split screen, double and triple exposures) and music. They were usually assembled by someone other than the director or the editor of the movie In formal terms, this style of editing offers discontinuity in graphic qualities, violations of the 180 degree rule, and the creation of impossible spatial matches. It is not concerned with the depiction of a comprehensible spatial or temporal continuity as is found in the classical Hollywood continuity system. It draws attention to temporal ellipses because changes between shots are obvious, less fluid, and non-seamless.

Eisenstein describes five methods of montage in his introductory essay “Word and Image”. These varieties of montage build one upon the other so the “higher” forms also include the approaches of the “simpler” varieties. In addition, the “lower” types of montage are limited to the complexity of meaning which they can communicate, and as the montage rises in complexity, so will the meaning it is able to communicate (primal emotions to intellectual ideals). It is easiest to understand these as part of a spectrum where, at one end, the image content matters very little, while at the other it determines everything about the choices and combinations of the edited film.

Eisenstein’s montage theories are based on the idea that montage originates in the “collision” between different shots in an illustration of the idea of thesis and antithesis. This basis allowed him to argue that montage is inherently dialectical, thus it should be considered a demonstration of Marxism and Hegelian philosophy. His collisions of shots were based on conflicts of scale, volume, rhythm, motion (speed, as well as direction of movement within the frame), as well as more conceptual values such as class.

The Plaza of the Cameras, is located below ground under the Plaza of the Americas. This multiexposure submerged ground plane composes views around campus making a physical montage of expose images that are captured in planes of aggitated water.

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The word montage came to identify . . . specifically the rapid, shock cutting that Eisenstein employed in his films. Its use survives to this day in the specially created ‘montage sequences’ inserted into Hollywood films to suggest, in a blur of double exposures, the rise to fame of an opera singer or, in brief model shots, the destruction of an airplane, a city or a planet.

—The Liveliest Art, Arthur Knight

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Submerged montage Plaza of the Cameras employs the multiple exposure structure of the cosmorama. This event however happens vertically between the sky and ground (Light and Dark). The Plaza displaces space below ground to offer a submerged voyeuristic condition below grade. The views are controlled by light flumes that house a mirror aimed at specific locations around campus. Century Tower, Library West, and a variety of focal depths are positioned to survey the scene above.

The focal distance, and therefore depth of field, is controlled both by the distance the light towers extrude from the earth as well as the height of the water plinth that receives the image.

The image enters through a pinhole of specfic size and inverts the perspective before reached by a 45 degree angled mirror.

This mirror reflects the image downward through and opening in the ceiling of the structure. The image is then projected onto the surface of the water plinth that not only receives the image but also reflects it back upward. Another suspended plaster white surface receives the re-reflected image that has now ‘passed through’ the surface of water and thus carries with it the distortion and agitation of the water below.

This experiential light sequence unveils the mechanics of the pinhole camera, and the camera obscura. It allows for an interactive and tactile experience as the image can become manipulated by a fingers touch via the water. The multiplicity of these events create a narrative as one passes through the set of images, montaging a unique set of events and a contructed memory of the ‘film’ taking place above.

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Methods of Montage 1.Metric - where the editing follows a specific number of frames (based purely on the physical nature of time), cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image. This montage is used to elicit the most basal and emotional of reactions in the audience.

2.Rhythmic - includes cutting based on time, but using the visual composition of the shots -- along with a change in the speed of the metric cuts -- to induce more complex meanings than what is possible with metric montage. Once sound was introduced, rhythmic montage also included audial elements (music, dialogue, sounds).

3.Tonal - a tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots -- not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics -- to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage.

4.Overtonal/Associational - the overtonal montage is the cumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect.

5.Intellectual - uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning.

Ex. Intellectual montage examples from Eisenstein’s October and Strike. In Strike, a shot of striking workers being attacked cut with a shot of a bull being slaughtered creates a film metaphor suggesting that the workers are being treated like cattle. This meaning does not exist in the individual shots; it only arises when they are juxtaposed.7

7

“Montage and Architecture,� p.117

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Cinerama

The panaramic Cinema A film plane is the area inside any camera where the individual frame of film or digital sensor is positioned during exposure, and the focused image is received upon the light-sensitive material. It is sometimes marked on camera body with the O| symbol where the veritcal bar represents the exact location.

Cinerama is the trademarked name for a widescreen process which works by simultaneously projecting images from three synchronized 35 mm projectors onto a huge, deeply-curved screen, subtending 146 degree of arc. It is also the trademarked name for the corporation which was formed to market it.

It was the first of a number of such processes introduced during the 1950s, then the movie inductry was reacting to competetition from television. Cinerama was presented to the public as a theatrical event, with reserved seating and printed programs, and audiencemembers often dressed in best attire for the evening.

The cinerama projectiong screen, rather then being a continuous surface like most screens, is made of hundreds of individual vertical strips of standard perforated screen material, each about 7/8 inch wide, with each strip angled to face the audience, so as to prevent light scattered from one end of the deeply curved screen from reflecting across the screen and washing out the image on the opposite end. The display is accompanied by a high quality seven track discrete directional surround sound system.

The original system involved shooting with three synchonizes cameras sharing a single shutter. This was later abandoned in favour of a system using a single camera and 70mm prints. This latter system lost the 146 degree field of view of the original three strip system and the resolution was markedly lower.

Three strip Cinerama did not use anamorphic lenses. although tro of the system used profuce the 70 mm prints. Later 35 mm anamorphic reduction were producedfor exhibition in theater with anamophic Cinemascope, compaticle projection lenses.

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Conclusion

|Campus Obscura| investigates the camera and fragmented perspectives of juxtaposed images in sequence. The project utilizes conceptual theories of film ( dialectical montage/ Miseen-scène) as a framework to understand the construction of time.

The camera and its movements establish a syntax that modifies and creates spatial sequences.

Following an itinerary through the University of Florida campus, this project maps the relationship between camera and filmed space. Perspective and observation studies reveal a variety of ‘apertures’ in which these sequences takes place (The Box Man, flaneur, and Panopticon).

These modes of movement establish unique relationships between the voyeur and the voyager, defining a specfic contextual response and altering one’s perception and therefore conception of a spatial sequence. Optical structures located along the cinematic path function as an imaginative vehicle for travel.

These pre-cinematic Vehicles of Shadow operate as an apparatus for site-seeing and nomadic curiosity. By dislocating the travel space through light and the projected image, inhabits move through spatiotemporal boundaries cognitively mapping space.

Constructing a variety of optical devices uncovered the mechanisms for shadow and space construction. The camera apparatus uses a shutter and aperture in the lens to control the amount of light, in order to achieve a specific exposure. Part of understanding the perspective, is the function and role of the manipulation of light via the shutter and aperture (time, space).Understanding architecture as the construction of the conception of boundaries and thresholds is ultimately based upon our perception. This perception relies on the often gradated and shifting measure of interior and exterior conditions and the relationships to which out inhabitation becomes realized. It is important to understand our definition as we understand our cities, as a constant flux and evolution that perpetually defines and redefines itself. With this in mind, the city is truly understood in motion while traversing its spaces, accommodating to the rhythm and growth and meaning. Travel, therefore, becomes the means in which to experience space and understand its relative relationships between interior and exterior. Film negotiates this

cognitive “traveling” through space as the camera becomes the voyager.

Campus Obscura explores architecture through filmic boundaries and fragments the linearity of perspective representation revealing a depth of human experience and temporality of vision embedded in synthetic perception. The University of Campus becomes a unique context for these didactic experiements and challenges the perception of place.

The campus obscura project redefines a familiar place and reorients the voyager sense of space. The Vehicles of Shadow transport the curious nomads of this University. These devices question perception and deconstruct our previous exisitng environment. The focus was to follow the forms of film as a means of producing an environment and the way cinema makes and questions space. These optical devices bring these teechniques into an inhabitable architectural situation, obscuring the realms of space and perception and generating a new realm that exists between perception, space, and memory. That place is familiar, but strange. A place where you are the voyeur and the voyager. This place is the Campus Obscura.

. . . . (cont’) I have written this, Campus Obscura, as a journal of my travels. I am a familiar stranger, who has become a voyeuristic urbanite. I embark with an observer-participant dialectic. I am a student, a sightseer, a photographer, a tourist, but above all a traveler. I have built these cameras as vehicles.

Vehicles that are the vessels that house our fleeting thoughts, our faded memories, and our obscure dreams.

Camera pans over film plane, and the figure.

It rests on a mirror, revealing the camera.

FADE OUT

Appendix

Writing Narratives Body Projections 35mm Photographs

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Narrative Writing

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Body Projections

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35mm Photographs

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Bibliography Quote on page 13

Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The writings of Dziga Vertov, London: University of California Press, 1984, 17 1. Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film Verso, New York, 2002, 44 2. Frederick Kiesler, “The Art of Architecture for Art,” Art News, 1957 v. 56, no.6, p. 41-43.

3. “Hiroshi Sugimoto” , Accessed Mar. 1 2011, www.sugimotohiroshi. com 4. Frederick Kiesler, “Building a Cinema Theater,” New York Evening Post, 2 February 1929

5. “Hiroshi Sugimoto” , Accessed Mar. 8 2011, www.sugimotohiroshi. com

6. Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture” Assemblage, no.

10, 1989 , 111-31

13. Kobo Abe, The Box Man, New York, Random House Inc, 1974, Quote on page 88 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Italy, Giulio Einaudi, 1972, 43 14. Bernard Tschumi, The Architectural Paradox, New York, MIT press, 1994, 114 15. Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, Univ. of California Press, 1997, 54 16. Kate, Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, 186 17. Vittorio Gregotti, Addressing New York Architectural League, New York, Abe Books, 1998, 243 18. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, New York, MIT press, 1982, 86

7.. Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture” Assemblage, no.

19. Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture, New York, MIT press, 1992, 15

10, 1989 ,117

20 Vittorio Gregotti, Addressing New York Architectural League, New

8. Ken Mogg , “Alfred Hitchcock”. . Senses of Cinema. Sensesofcinema. com. Retrieved 18 July 2010 9. Scott Nygren, Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the unfolding of history, Minessota, Minessota Press, 2007 p. 103 10. Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles, London, England: MIT press, 1999, 120 11. Krystian Woznicki, “Towards a Cartography of Japanese Anime Interview with Azuma Hiroki”. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/ nettime-l-9802/msg00101.html. Retrieved 2006-08-15 12. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, London: MIT press, 1994, 26

York, Abe Books, 1998, 243 21 Michael Fazio, Buildings Across Time, London, Laurence King Publishing, 2004, 198 22 Kenzo Tange, Katsura, Tradition Creation in Japanese Architecture.

London, Yale University Press, 1972, 234 23 John Norwich Julius, Great Architecture of the World, New York, Random House, 1975, 46 24 Michael Fazio, Buildings Across Time, London, Laurence King Publishing, 2004, 198

25 Kenzo Tange, Katsura, Tradition Creation in Japanese Architecture.

London, Yale University Press, 1972, 234 26 John Norwich Julius, Great Architecture of the World, New York, Random House, 1975, 46 27 Mortimer Wheeler, Temples, Tombs, Palaces & Fortress of Asia, London, Spring Books, 1965 44 28 John Norwich Julius, Great Architecture of the World, New York, Random House, 1975, 46

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Images

*All images, photographs and drawings by author unless otherwise noted *

Image on page 13 Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The writings of Dziga Vertov, London: University of California Press, 1984, 17 Image on page 21 Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, andFilm Verso, New York, 2002, 44 Images on page 23-29 “Hiroshi Sugimoto” , Accessed Mar. 1 2011, www.sugimotohiroshi.com Images on page 31 Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture” Assemblage, no. 10, 1989 ,117 Images on page 33 Ken Mogg , “Alfred Hitchcock”. . Senses of Cinema. Sensesofcinema.com.

Retrieved 18 July 2010 Images on page 35 Scott Nygren, Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the unfolding of history, Minessota, Minessota Press, 2007 p. 103 Images on page 37-45 Shinya Tsukamoto, A Snake of June, Kaijyu Theater, 2002 Images on page 49-61 Hideaki Anno, The Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Gainax, 1995 Images on page 63-67 Mediaworks, Speed Grapher, Japan, Tokyopop, 2005 Image on page 73

Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, London: MIT press, 1994, 26 Image on page 75 13 Kobo Abe, The Box Man, New York, Random House Inc, 1974, 4