Month: March 2013

Spatially speaking, the game Parallax looks pretty amazing, especially now that, in the words of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the developers—two students at Queen’s University, calling themselves Toasty Games—have “decided to turn off all the gravity.”

The resulting “gravitational surface test,” seen in the first video embedded above, lets you twist, meander, level-hop, and corkscrew around inside the game’s “overlapping spatial dimensions,” passing through portals on windowed ribbons of black and white space.

The game has not been released yet, but, if it looks like something you might want to play someday, consider voting for Parallax over on Steam Greenlight.

[Image: The Auburn Dam site, via Google Maps].

While re-reading John McPhee’s excellent book Assembling California last month for the San Andreas Fault National Park studio, I was struck once again by a short description of a Californian landscape partially redesigned in preparation for a reservoir that never arrived.

McPhee is referring to the Auburn Dam, in the city of Auburn, northeast of Sacramento (and near a small town called, of all things, Cool, California). The $1 billion Auburn Dam would have been “the largest concrete arched dam in the world,” according to Geoengineer.org, but construction was abandoned over fears that seismic activity might cause the dam to collapse, inundating Sacramento.

Construction was begun, however, and its cessation produced some rather unassuming ruins—basically large piles of exposed gravel and rock now eroding in springtime floods.

Nonetheless, these mounds were not cheap, including “$327 million concrete abutments [that] stand in stark contrast to the rest of the oak-filled canyon,” as the Auburn-Cool Trail site (or ACT) explains. “The washout of the 250-foot coffer dam in 1986 left huge scars that continue to erode, with large broken pipes sticking out in a precarious manner. Hasty roadbuilding for the project has contributed to landslides that have caused sedimentation and increased turbidity in the river downstream and in Folsom Lake. The cost of seasonal repairs on the service roads alone has run into the millions of dollars, and many roads remain cracked and unsafe.”

[Image: A bypass tunnel built in anticipation of the never-completed Auburn Dam; photo by D.P. Zeccos of Geoengineer.org].

Amazingly, though, and this is where we come to John McPhee, regional infrastructure was constructed with an eye on what the landscape would look like in the future, given the presence of the Auburn Dam, leading to surreal sights like the Foresthill Bridge.

The bridge, which you can still drive on today, is a towering structure remarkably out of proportion with the landscape, its unnecessary height all but incomprehensible until you imagine the cold waters of the American River rising up behind the Auburn Dam, forming a recreational lake and reservoir, the lights of the bridge reflected at night in the waters below. “Not particularly long,” McPhee quips, “the bridge was built so high in order to clear the lake that wasn’t there.”

[Image: The Foresthill Bridge, via Wikipedia].

Weirdest of all, McPhee writes, there were boat docks built high up on the surrounding hillsides, waiting for their lake.

One gravel boat ramp, he explains, “several hundred yards long, descends a steep slope and ends high and nowhere, a dangling cul-de-sac. The skeletons [a skeleton crew of federal workers stationed at the former dam site] call it ‘the largest and highest unused boat ramp in California.’ Houses that cling to the canyon sides look into the empty pit. They were built around the future lakeshore under the promise of rising water. You can almost see their boat docks projecting into the air. Thirty-three hundred quarter-acre lots were platted in a subdivision called Auburn Lake Trails.”

[Image: The expected waters of a lake that never arrived; via Wikipedia].

While I will confess that, while using the omniscient eye of Google Maps, I can’t find these gravel boat ramps leading down to the rim of a lake that doesn’t exist—looking in vain for a maze of quasi-lakeside home lots perched uselessly in the hills—I assume that it’s either because the ramps have long since revegetated, given the two decades that have passed since the publication of McPhee’s book, or perhaps because there was a certain amount of willful projection on McPhee’s part in the first place.

After all, the idea of a line of homes built far up in the hills somewhere, overlooking an empty space in which a lake should be, is so beautiful, and so perfectly odd, that it would be tempting to conjure it into being, imagining bored kids in a town called Cool riding their bikes down to lost docks in the woods each summer near sunset, climbing over maritime ruins slowly crumbling in the mountains, throwing rocks at rotting lifejackets, building small forts inside the discarded hulls of someone else’s midlife crisis, perhaps still waiting, even hoping, for a flood to come.

[Image: Fallen rockets at the bottom of the sea; photo by Bezos Expeditions, via Discovery News].

News this week that the discarded engines of the Apollo rockets from the moon missions of the 1960s have been found at the bottom of the ocean by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos is perhaps further indication that the robber barons of the 21st-century will be spending at least some of their fortunes on complex, engineering-oriented, and slightly Nemo-like adventures, whether that means mining asteroids, flying civilians into space, building 10,000-year clocks in the mountains of west Texas, traveling down into the deepest trenches on Earth, or, yes, performing gonzo acts of space archaeology 400 miles off the east coast of Florida.

Bezos’s description of the rocket-age ruins now on their way back to dry land—and, eventually, into a museum—puts a fairly Ballardian spin on the discovery: “We’ve seen an underwater wonderland,” he quipped, “an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines,” a garden of fallen offworld technologies appearing to grow coral at the bottom of the sea.

I’m reminded of a line from Robert Charles Wilson’s novel Axis, where Wilson writes that “the sky filled with the luminous debris of ancient, incomprehensible machines,” fragmentary gears and circuits drifting through the air like mechanical snow, only, here, it’s the equipment of our own recent history having washed down through the ocean, taking on the ringed appearance of coral.

Maintaining his Ballardian tone, Bezos suggested that the seafloor from which the rockets were pulled was not unlike the surface of the moon: “We on the team were often struck by poetic echoes of the lunar missions. The buoyancy of the ROVs looks every bit like microgravity. The blackness of the horizon. The gray and colourless ocean floor. Only the occasional deep sea fish broke the illusion.”

Explaining his interest in restoring the behemoth pieces of equipment being re-absorbed into the planetary ecosystem, Bezos adds that his team “photographed many beautiful objects in situ and have now recovered many prime pieces. Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible.” Now, he says, “We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mph re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface.” Sadly, doing this required interrupting what might someday have been a reef, possibly one of the most interesting points to take away from all of this—that even something as unearthly as rockets, given enough time and isolation, could become overgrown, a kind of Angkor Wat of the sea, indistinguishable from life in the oceans.

Last year, I posted about a summer workshop held in upstate New York run by architect David Gersten of the Cooper Union. Well, it’s back and this summer’s 8-week program is even more ambitious. However, note that the deadline for applications fast approaches (due March 25).

[Images: Photos from Arts Letters & Numbers; applications for the summer 2013 workshop are due March 25].

As Gersten himself describes it, this summer’s workshop will be “structured through six disciplines: construction, drawing, film/photography, writing, theater and music/sound,” forming a kind of “disciplinary exquisite corpse.” Participants in each of these fields “will work in parallel and in close proximity, directly interacting though a framework of shared questions and actions.”

During the eight-week intensive workshop, together, we will build a bridge; a bridge that is a stage, a drawing board, a film screen, a story, a place to act—a bridge between many disciplines. This bridge will be co-constructed, as each step in its construction will be developed as a series of shared questions across all of the disciplines. As we excavate the site, we will ask: What is excavation in drawing? in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As we pour the foundations we will ask what are foundations in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As we raise the structure, we will ask what is structure in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music. As raise a new horizon, we will ask; what is horizon in drawing, in film, in writing, in theater, in music? Week by week as we move thought the shared questions we will co-construct a work, an emergent space between all of the disciplines.

The grand finale of the eight weeks will be “a live performance built between all of the works,” an interdisciplinary opera of construction, poetry, drawing, light, and words.

[Image: Photo from Arts Letters & Numbers].

As is probably obvious, this is a much more embodied and physically engaged form of architectural exploration, in many ways at the opposite end of the world from sitting inside, designing little triangle-shaped tiles in Rhino all day, and, as such, it offers a great way to experience the humid and heavy vegetation of a New York forest outside the nighttime lights of the city for a few weeks, exploring the rigors of other disciplines (and possibly even driving heavy excavation equipment).

[Image: Photo from Arts Letters & Numbers].

Application information and a short film about the summer program are available on the project website.

[Image: An otherwise irrelevant photo of early night-vision technology used during the Vietnam War; courtesy of the U.S. Army].

So where were we?

Just clearing out a few old links for a fresh start. Last spring, Danger Room reported that DARPA had been hoping to step into the world of “battlefield illusions,” developing “technologies that will ‘manage the adversary’s sensory perception’ in order to ‘confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his or her] actions.'” This includes “frontline illusions intended to disrupt enemy warfighters’ thought patterns.”

The program—a kind of military-sensory complex—is based on the belief that “if researchers can better understand ‘how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs,’ the military should be able to develop ‘auditory and visual’ hallucinations that will ‘provide tactical advantage for our forces.'”

But what might the architectural—or the more generally urban, the very broadly spatial—implications of such a technology be? Can managing or choreographing perception through shared hallucinations and techniques of sensory misdirection in the built environment be a tool increasingly useful for designers today? Even DARPA refers to this sub-class of programs as “Shaping the Environment“—so is there a civilian, or, more accurately, a deweaponized, version of these deployable “illusions” that could be used by architects or even by set & interior designers for real-time augmentations of everyday space? For “engineering ghosts” in the rooms around us, where the rooms themselves are sometimes ghosts?

After all, urban design as a hand-me-down technology from the military is nothing new, so adapting battlefield misperceptions to architectural use on the homefront would hardly be surprising.

Perhaps it’d be like Microsoft’s patented Immersive Display Experience, an architecture of overlapping stitched projections such that “the peripheral image appears as an extension of the primary image,” and, in the process, the room you’re standing in becomes a game display.

[Image: Microsoft’s Immersive Display Experience].

How could this be used by architects?

While we’re on the subject of DARPA, meanwhile, another even older piece of news from their designers’ desks was this 2011 announcement that they’d begun constructing “an entirely new class of electronic systems that can meet the demands of dynamic environments.” These would be called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (or SyNAPSE), a “program [that] aims to fundamentally alter conventional designs by developing biological-scale neuromorphic electronic systems that mimic important functions of a human brain.” A strange future of neuromorphic plastic brains illusioneering streets into existence—invisible cities, flickering and disruptive—we humans will try and, haplessly, fail to navigate.