Month: October 2011

[Image: “Meelas Yadee” (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Nettle’s newest album, El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai, released last month by Sub Rosa, comes with an awesome premise: it is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of Stanley Kubrick’s film, The Shining, set in a mothballed luxury hotel in Dubai. It is sonic architecture fiction.

Less a horror film, however, than its predecessor, Nettle’s version seems instead to offer a melancholy audio glimpse of a world in decline: the album’s family lost in circumstances far too large—and too alienating, too foreign—to comprehend fully, unraveling alone in the hotel’s empty rooms and hallways.

[Image: “Fatima’s Kitchen Cupboard” (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

El Resplandor‘s liner notes feature these photographs by Lamya Gargash, depicting extravagantly furnished rooms in afternoon darkness, empty kitchens, halls, and ruined stairways in the UAE.

As the artist herself explains, many of the houses seen here “are recently vacant, whereas others have been deserted for a long time. There were some houses that still had people living in them when I started my project; the families residing there were preparing to move to newer homes.” Many more images from the series can be found here.

[Images: (top) “Blue Purple Chair” (2005-2006) and (bottom) “The Staircase” (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Jace Clayton and Lindsay Cuff of Nettle will be at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 on Friday afternoon, October 28th, to talk about the album, the entirety of which will be streamed throughout the day.

[Image: “Mona Lisa” (2005-2006) by Lamya Gargash].

Stop by if you’re in the area, not only to learn more about the concept behind the album—after all, there’s something highly compelling about the idea of a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake (perhaps this could be the first soundtrack optioned by Hollywood for a film it later serves to score)—but also about the technical set-up used by the band during studio production and live sets. Nettle’s more sonically aggressive earlier work, Build a Fort, Set that On Fire, is also worth a listen in the meantime.

Since 2009, an annual Thrilling Wonder Stories event has taken place at the Architectural Association in London, bringing people together from multiple disciplines to explore the spaces between fiction, science, and design.

On one hand, these events take the form of an extended look into the role of architectural spaces—including real buildings, but also film sets, computer game environments, and spatial simulations—in propelling, staging, catalyzing, or otherwise framing narrative storylines. This requires speaking not only to architects, but to novelists, game developers, screenwriters, film set designers, and even Hollywood directors to discuss their own particular requirements for, and relationships to, the built environment—but also to ask, more specifically, how the spaces they design, describe, feature, or build affect the development of narrative.

This is the cultural dimension of the event—the “wonder stories.”

On the other hand, Thrilling Wonder Stories has also looked both to science and science fiction as resources of ideas that might play spatial roles in future design projects—where I use the word spatial, not architectural, very deliberately, so as not to limit this to a discussion of buildings. This means bringing in robot makers and biologists, geologists and geneticists, not to ask them about architecture but simply to learn about their work. The point, in other words, is not to extract architectural ideas from their research—as if fully formed building programs could somehow be pulled from a presentation about synthetic organisms—but simply to add to the overall mix of scientific (and science fictional) ideas available for reference in future design conversations.

This is the “thrilling wonder” side of the series.

[Images: Photos from Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 at the Architectural Association].

To date, Liam Young, the event’s co-organizer, and I have hosted comics author Warren Ellis, architect Sir Peter Cook of Archigram, game critic Jim Rossignol, TED Fellow and architectural biologist Rachel Armstrong, novelists Will Self and Jeff VanderMeer, spatial provocateurs Ant Farm, designer Matt Webb of BERG, and more than a dozen other figures from the worlds of film, gaming, architecture, literature, engineering, science, interaction design, and more.

[Image: From “Animal Superpowers” by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada; Woebken will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

This year, we’re trying out an ambitious new format. Not only are we teaming up with Popular Science magazine as our media partner and co-organizer—so watch for content on popsci.com in the lead up to and during the event—but we are leading two simultaneous events: one at the Architectural Association in London, the other across the pond at Studio-X NYC.

So, on Friday, October 28th, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3—sponsored by the Architectural Association, Studio-X NYC, and Popular Science—kicks off in London with a truly phenomenal line-up. It’s an all day blow-out, lasting from noon to 10pm, featuring:

VINCENZO NATALI*
Director of Cube, Splice, and forthcoming feature films based on J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Neuromancer by William Gibson

BRUCE STERLING
Scifi author, commentator, and futurist

KEVIN SLAVIN
Game designer and theorist of “how algorithms shape our world“

ANDREW LOCKLEY
Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor for Inception, compositing/2D supervisor for Batman Begins and Children of Men

PHILIP BEESLEY
Digital media artist and experimental architect

CHRISTIAN LORENZ SCHEURER
Concept artist and illustrator for computer games and films such as The Matrix, Dark City, The Fifth Element, and Superman Returns

CHARLIE TUESDAY GATES
Taxidermy artist and sculptor—to lead a live taxidermy workshop

DR. RODERICH GROSS AND THE NATURAL ROBOTICS LAB
Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield—to lead a live Swarm Robotics demonstration

GAVIN ROTHERY
Concept artist for Duncan Jones’s film Moon

GUSTAV HOEGEN
Animatronics engineer for Hellboy, Clash of the Titans, and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Prometheus

JULIAN BLEECKER
Designer, technologist, and researcher at the Los Angeles-based Near Future Laboratory

RADIO SCIENCE ORCHESTRA
Theremin-led electro-acoustic ensemble

SPOV
Motion graphics artists for Discovery Channel’s Future Weapons and Project Earth

ZELIG SOUND
Music, composition, and sound design for film and television

Better yet, Matt Jones of the ultra-talented design studio BERG will join Liam Young to serve as co-host for the day. Here’s a map for how to get there; the event is free but space is limited.

[Image: “Glass Weed” from Super-Natural Garden by Simone Ferracina; Ferracina will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

That same day—Friday, October 28th—over at Studio-X NYC, Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 will kick off at 1pm local time, lasting till 4 or 4:30pm. Speaking that day are:

NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX
Architect and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

HARI KUNZRU
Novelist and author of Gods Without Men, Transmission, and The Impressionist

BJARKE INGELS
Architect, WSJ Magazine 2011 architectural innovator of the year, and author of Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution

SETH FLETCHER
Science writer, senior editor of Popular Science, and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy

JACE CLAYTON AND LINDSAY CUFF OF NETTLE
Nettle’s new album, El Resplandor, is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai

[Image: One of many evolutionary robotic research projects by Hod Lipson, featured in this PDF; Lipson will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC].

Then, Saturday, October 29th, everything comes to a close with an epic second day—from 2-7pm—at Studio-X NYC, featuring:

JAMES FLEMING
Historian and author of Fixing The Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

MARC KAUFMAN
Science writer for the Washington Post and author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth

ANDREW BLUM
Journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

DAVID BENJAMIN
Architect and co-director of The Living

DEBBIE CHACHRA
Researcher and educator in biological materials and engineering design, featured in Wired UK‘s 2010 “Year In Ideas”

HOD LIPSON
Researcher in evolutionary robotics and the future of 3D printing at Cornell University

CARLOS OLGUIN
Designer at Autodesk Research working on the intersection of bio-nanotechnology and 3D visualization

CHRIS WOEBKEN
Interaction designer

SIMONE FERRACINA
Architect, winner of the 2011 Animal Architecture Awards, and author of Organs Everywhere

DAVE GRACER
Insect agriculturalist at Small Stock Foods

MORRIS BENJAMINSON
Bioengineer of in-vitro edible muscle protein and CEO of Zymotech Enterprises

ANDREW HESSEL
Science writer and open-source biologist, focusing on bacterial genomics

The events in New York will be moderated by myself, Studio-X NYC co-director Nicola Twilley, and PopSci senior associate editor Ryan Bradley. In both locations, events are free and open to the public; however, if you plan on attending the Studio-X NYC event, please register as limited space will be available. Here’s a map.

[Image: The “plastic” extruded by New England’s Colletes inaequalis bees; photo by Debbie Chachra].

Finally, if you can’t make it in person, consider following Thrilling Wonder Stories on Twitter—and keep your eye out at the end of summer 2012, for the Thrilling Wonder Stories book, published by the Architectural Association.

But I hope to see some of you there!

*Vincenzo Natali will be speaking via Skype.

[Image: The GroundBot system by Rotundus].

The GroundBot system by Swedish firm Rotundus is a remote-controlled, all-weather polycarbonate sphere that “can trundle through snow, mud and sand as it supplies a live feed via a pair of cameras,” Wired UK explains. “Its operator sees the image in 3D on a screen.”

It apparently comes with knobby treads or without.

[Image: The GroundBot system by Rotundus].

The sphere is currently “undergoing trials” with the Swedish Defense Forces for use “in airports and other locations in need of surveillance,” but the system also has potential applications in urban mapping, remote terrain exploration, and even post-disaster search and rescue. While the GroundBot can only reach speeds a bit more than 6mph—which means it won’t be breaking any speed records, and it certainly won’t be hard to outrun—the idea that failed criminals of the future might be seen sprinting away from swarms of autonomous black spheres the size of car tires is quite extraordinary.

[Images: The GroundBot system by Rotundus on patrol].

See the Rotundus site for more info.

[Image: The “Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera” by Jonas Pfeil].

The “Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera,” designed by Jonas Pfeil as part of his thesis project at the Technical University of Berlin, creates spherical panoramas after being thrown into the air.

The camera “captures an image at the highest point of flight—when it is hardly moving.” It “takes full spherical panoramas, requires no preparation and images are taken instantaneously. It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images.” You can see it at work in this video:

Pfeil explains in detail:

Our camera uses 36 fixed-focus 2 megapixel mobile phone camera modules. The camera modules are mounted in a robust, 3D-printed, ball-shaped enclosure that is padded with foam and handles just like a ball. Our camera contains an accelerometer which we use to measure launch acceleration. Integration lets us predict rise time to the highest point, where we trigger the exposure. After catching the ball camera, pictures are downloaded in seconds using USB and automatically shown in our spherical panoramic viewer. This lets users interactively explore a full representation of the captured environment.

It’s easy enough to imagine such a thing being mass-produced and taken up by the Lomo crowd; but it seems equally likely that such a technology could be put to use aiding military operations in urbanized terrain, with otherwise disoriented squad leaders tossing “robust” optical grenades up above dividing walls and blocked streets to see what lies beyond.

Either way, a throwable camera strong enough to withstand bad weather and strong bounces—and able to store hundreds of images—sounds like an amazing way to start documenting the urban landscape. In fact, the very idea that a “photograph” would thus correspond to a spherical sampling of all the objects and events in a given area adds an intriguing spatial dimension to the act of creating images. It’s a kind of reverse-firework: rather than release light into the sky, it steals traces of the light it finds there.

(Spotted via Popular Photography).

[Image: The Blue Angels create their own cloud systems over the San Francisco Bay; view larger].

My week in San Francisco, now at an end, coincided with Fleet Week—and, thus, the arrival of the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy’s “Flight Demonstration Squad.” While the often overwhelming noise of the Blue Angels—rattling whole buildings at a time and setting off car alarms—is extremely polarizing, both acoustically and politically, I continued to have incredibly interesting, albeit very brief, conversations about them, extending beyond mere love or hate.

1) Performance Physics
After a friend of mine drove into town for a meeting, he described to me how the individual planes—high-speed military jets flying often disconcertingly low over the city in geometrically complex configurations—would disappear behind one of San Francisco’s many hills… only to pop out behind a different hill altogether, visibly out of synch with the Doppler’d roar of its passage (which seemed to echo hilltop to hilltop across the Bay).

But then another identical jet—or was it the same?—would appear behind a different hill, or it would come circling up from another direction entirely, and it began to feel, my friend explained, as if he had inadvertently driven into the middle of a kind of quantum event, with the same—or was it?—airplane appearing and disappearing, over and over again, reappearing and swooping back from different angles, all the while mis-timed with its own acoustic side-effects.

It was, we might say, not performance art but performance physics: an immersive, urban-scale demonstration of quantum dislocation, one object—or multiple?—and multiple objects—or just one?—constantly out of self-synch in a single setting. It was not the military-industry complex but airborne physics: the skies of San Francisco temporarily modeling an inter-dimensional event.

2) Sky Forensics
During the two-day “blogging workshop” that I led this past weekend at the San Francisco Art Institute, one of the participants—artist Alex Shepard—noted that the passage of the Blue Angels had been setting off car alarms all over the city. But, he added, the locations of the car alarms always—of course—coincided with the physical passage of the airplanes, following around right behind them; so, he suggested, you could actually reconstruct the aerial trajectories of the planes through entirely indirect means, using nothing but AAA data and SFPD noise complaints.

These street-level data, collated with enough ambition and accuracy, could thus be seen as a kind of fossil record for the Blue Angels’ weekend performance: a distributed motion-capture device parked throughout the peninsular city. The planes, in other words, left more traces than just artificial clouds: they mapped their own passage through car alarms.

In twenty years’ time, then, forensic historians could reconstruct the skies of Fleet Week 2011 using nothing but data from parked cars.

[Image: The literary medium of clouds: J.G. Ballard’s “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D” and Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño].

3) Literary Climatology
Because we met up for a blogging workshop, the students at the SFAI and I began to talk about other media for literary self-expression—beyond paper and digital screens—and we briefly got onto the subject of skywriting. A Geico ad had been spotted earlier in the day, one of them pointed out, drifting from the back of a skywriting plane, as if in competition with the more abstract cloud shapes produced by the Blue Angels (who, seemingly seduced by San Francisco, took to drawing hearts in the sky).

That led us to the subject of J.G. Ballard’s short story, “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D,” in which a small Pacific island—if I remember the story correctly—serves as the setting of a peculiar cultural contest: the advanced cultivation of artificial clouds, using kites and small by-planes.

From there, we got onto the premise of Roberto Bolaño’s novella Distant Star. There, Bolaño tells the story of Carlos Wieder, a poet who—to quote the Daily Telegraph, as I am ironically on board an airplane right now, flying over central Wyoming, and thus do not have access to my copy of the book—”wears the uniform of the Chilean air force and pilots an old Messerschmitt—with which he writes stirring poetic phrases in the sky. The generals and their wives think these aerial stunts are wonderfully entertaining, but Wieder’s professed ambition is to inaugurate a new, populist poetry of “barbarism”, which abandons old literatures and flies into the glorious future.”

The idea of blogging in the sky through the medium of artificial weather—chemically produced, aerodynamic clouds draping the city in a haze of literary climatology—thus presented at least one more alternative way of looking at the highly polarizing urban presence of the Blue Angels.

[Image: The weird artificial geology of “soil equivalent” landfill foam; image courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency].

On the way over to the west coast last week, I read Universal Foam: Exploring the Science of Nature’s Most Mysterious Substance by Sidney Perkowitz. Amongst references to “applied foam science,” “computational foam” studies, and even a “power-producing sonoluminescent foam” that might someday be used to generate electricity for the national grid, there were two ideas for future infrastructure that seem worth repeating here.

1) Foam Roads
While discussing the buffering quality foam can offer as protection against explosions, Perkowitz points out the logical next step in the neutralization of land mines: he writes, roughly 11 years ago, that “a quick-hardening rigid polyurethane foam is being tested at Sandia”—already manufacturers of a successful “decontamination foam“—”for use in nullifying mines on land or in water by buffering soldiers and equipment against their explosive force, or to lay down a safe ribbon for vehicles to travel.”

This “safe ribbon” is, of course, a road—a road made entirely of foam, laid down over active land mines so as to protect vehicles against detonation from below. A whole new class of transportation infrastructure arises: unexplodable foam roads fanning out across military landscapes; instant roads-in-a-can, like shaving cream, that you spray over dangerous terrain; even foam bridges spanning rivers and caves.

Whether or not we’ll see roads-in-a-can coming soon to a Home Depot or city works department near you, however, I’d be shocked not to see foam-road weapons in a computer game shortly—foamed infrastructure brought to you in a flash as new roads and bridges bubble out and harden over otherwise inaccessible terrain. Post-geologic weaponized foam activities.

[Image: Applying “soil equivalent” landfill foam; image courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency].

2) Foam Geotechnics
Later in the book, Perkowitz refers to “the possibility that foam could extinguish the twenty-year old Percy Coal Mine fire in Pennsylvania,” as well as to “the use of an acidic foam to destroy asbestos installed in buildings by simply spraying it on.” In both cases, you would fill a closed space with foam, which would thus go to work extinguishing underground fires or chemically dissolving asbestos.

However, this segues directly into a brief exploration of the geotechnical implications of quick-hardening foam. Chemist Paul Kittle, Perkowitz explains, “worked out a way to cover garbage landfills with foam” back in the 1980s. Quoting at length:

A significant portion of a landfill is occupied by plain dirt, which according to EPA guidelines must be piled six inches deep every night to cover that day’s trash. Kittle came up with an environmentally benign shaving cream-like foam that would adhere even to steep slopes and would not blow away. The foam stopped rats and bugs, and prevented odors from rising. But unlike dirt, it dissipated after thirty-six hours, no longer taking up room when it was no longer needed under newer trash. For this reason, says Kittle, using his foam could save up to 15 percent of landfill space.

Geotechnical foams are now used in places like the Puente Hills landfill in Los Angeles, using equipment manufactured by Rusmar Foam; Rusmar offers foams of various durations, from 12 hours to 180 days, and with scents such as Vanilla and Wintergreen. Best of all, their product is called “Soil Equivalent Foam”—it is an earth-surrogate, a replicant geology.

But this leaves Perkowitz with what he calls “an image to relish”: Perkowitz closes that section of his book imagining “the huge track vehicle Kittle designed, patiently spreading liquid foam to cover acres of garbage made partly of indestructible foamed plastic peanuts, coffee cups, and McDonald’s clamshells.” Inside a plastic earth, in other words, we simply find more plastics, in an artificial geology sealed with geotechnical foam. Literally what on earth might future geologists think?