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[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.

[Image: Photo: The “cemetery and church at Teampull Eion, Isle of Lewis,” courtesy of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland].

One of many things I was excited to discover while working on the British Exploratory Land Archive project, and while getting ready for tonight’s lecture at the Architectural Association, is the “Scotland’s Landscapes” collection of aerial archaeology photographs from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

[Image: (top) The “remains of White Castle Fort“; (bottom) the “remains of the Northshield Rings.” Photos courtesy of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland].

“As the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded,” we read, “Scotland’s earliest ancestors ventured northwards, exploring a wild, fertile territory. Nomadic hunter-gatherers at first, they made the decision to stay for good—to farm and to build. From that moment on, people began to write their story firmly into the fabric of the landscape.” Indeed, today, “every inch of Scotland—whether remote hilltop, fertile floodplain, or storm-lashed coastline—has been shaped, changed and moulded by its people.”

[Image: Photo: The (modernday) “Fife Earth Project at St. Ninian’s Open Cast Site,” courtesy of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland].

Quoting at length:

The landscapes they lived on were remarkable in their diversity. Vast forests of pine and birch ran through one of the world’s oldest mountain ranges—once as high as the Himalayas but over millennia scoured and compressed by sheets of ice a mile thick. On hundreds of islands around a saw-edged coastline, communities flourished, linked to each other and the wider world by the sea, the transport superhighway of ancient times.

Many of the resulting settlements have the appearance of inland islands, isolated shapes and ringed perimeters still visible from the air.

[Image: Photo: The “remains of the lazy beds and enclosures at Muidhe on the Isle of Skye,” courtesy of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland].

In any case, here are some of the photos—just a random selection of eye-candy for a Thursday afternoon.

[Images: Aerial view of Lochindorb Castle, courtesy of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland].

Meanwhile, these and many other photos are available in a new book by James Crawford, called Scotland’s Landscapes: The National Collection of Aerial Photography, and you can see more online here.

[Image: Green screen; image via Geek Magazine].

Earlier this week, Petro Vlahos, described by the BBC as “the pioneer of blue- and green-screen systems” in cinema, passed away. Vlahos’s highly specific recoloring of certain surfaces in the everyday built environment allowed “filmmakers to superimpose actors and other objects against separately filmed backgrounds”; they are walls that aren’t really there:

He called his invention the colour-difference travelling matte scheme. Like pre-existing blue-screen techniques it involves filming a scene against an aquamarine blue-coloured background. This is used to generate a matte—which is transparent wherever the blue-colour features on the original film, and opaque elsewhere. This can then be used to superimpose a separately filmed scene or visual effects to create a composite.

Special effects, animated actors, entire sets and spaces that weren’t physically present during filming: these aquamarine-colored surfaces are almost conjuring windows through which other environments can be optically inserted into filmed representations of the present moment.

These sorts of walls and surfaces are not architecture, we might say, but pure spatial effects, a kind of representational sleight of hand through which the boundaries and contents of a location can be infinitely expanded. There is no “building,” then, to put this in Matrix-speak; there are only spatial implications. Green screen architecture, here, would simply be a visual space-holder through which to substitute other environments entirely: a kind of permanent, physically real special effect that, in the end, is just a coat of paint.

It’s interesting, in this interpretation, that “green screens” or a rough optical equivalent are not more commonly utilized in architectural or interior design—even if only as an ironic gesture toward the possibility that, say, a group of friends taking photographs in your living room, with its weird green wall on one side, or in the lobby of that hotel, with its green screen backdrop, might somehow be able to insert into the resulting photographs otherwise non-present spatial realities, as if they had been photographed in front of a Stargate or a Holodeck, a window creaking open between worlds.

In fact, this was exactly the strange feeling I had when living just two buildings away from a green screen lot in Los Angeles, as if the painted green surface there, looming over the empty lot on our street corner, was standing sentinel, patiently awaiting new worlds to appear, all the while being nothing more than a wall of green plywood.

[Image: “Three tri-bar targets remaining at Cuddeback Lake… the flat surfaces are peeling, crumbling and sprouting, producing dimensionality, and relief.” Photo by and courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation].

“There are dozens of aerial photo calibration targets across the USA,” the Center for Land Use Interpretation reports, “curious land-based two-dimensional optical artifacts used for the development of aerial photography and aircraft. They were made mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, though some apparently later than that, and many are still in use, though their history is obscure.”

These symbols—like I-Ching trigrams for machines—are used as “a platform to test, calibrate, and focus aerial cameras traveling at different speeds and altitudes,” CLUI explains, similar to “an eye chart at the optometrist, where the smallest group of bars that can be resolved marks the limit of the resolution for the optical instrument that is being used.”

[Image: A tri-bar array at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida; via CLUI].

Formally speaking, the targets could be compared to mis-painted concrete parking lots in the middle of the nowhere, using “sets of parallel and perpendicular bars duplicated at 15 or so different sizes.” This “configuration is sometimes referred to as a 5:1 aspect Tri-bar Array, and follows a similar relative scale as a common resolution test chart known as the 1951 USAF Resolving Power Test Target, conforming to milspec MIL-STD-150A. This test pattern is still widely used to determine the resolving power of microscopes, telescopes, cameras, and scanners.”

[Image: A “standard tri-bar test pattern on the Photo Resolution Range at Edwards that has been greatly expanded,” CLUI writes; via CLUI].

CLUI points out that the history and location of the tri-bar patterns corresponds to the rise of high-altitude “flying cameras” developed during the Cold War—i.e. spy planes whose purpose was not to deliver ordnance to the far side of the world but simply to take detailed photographs.

[Image: An “especially exotic” expanded tri-bar array at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; via CLUI].

Further, “the largest concentration of calibration targets in one place is on the grounds of Edwards Air Force Base” in California, “in an area referred to as the photo resolution range, where 15 calibration targets run for 20 miles across the southeast side of the base in a line, so multiple targets can be photographed in one pass. There is some variation in the size and shape of the targets at Edwards, suggesting updates and modifications for specific programs. A number of the targets there also have aircraft hulks next to them, added to provide additional, realistic subjects for testing cameras.”

A quick scan of Google Maps locates the photo resolution range relatively easily; broadly speaking, just go up to the right and down to the left from, say, this point and you’ll find the targets.

[Image: Calibration targets from the photo resolution range, Edwards Air Force Base; from Google Maps].

Although I am truly fascinated by what sorts of optical landmarks might yet be developed for field-testing the optical capabilities of drones, as if the world might soon be peppered with opthalmic infrastructure for self-training autonomous machines, it is also quite intriguing to realize that these calibration targets are, in effect, ruins, obsolete sensory hold-overs from an earlier age of film-based cameras and less-powerful lenses. Calibrating nothing, they are now just curious emblems of a previous generation of surveillance technology, robot-readable hieroglyphs whose machines have all moved on.

With my eyes on all things fault-related these days, as we’re now in the third week of the San Andreas Fault National Park studio up at Columbia, I was interested in a brief moment from poet Simon Armitage’s new memoir, Walking Home.

[Image: Hadrian’s Wall (not the wall described below) on the Whin Sill, via Wikipedia].

While hiking with a friend across a geological formation called the Whin Sill, in the northern Pennines, Armitage learns something extraordinary:

Stopping to appreciate a high and long dry-stone wall that bisects two valleys, [his fellow hiker] Chris explains how the shape, size, colour and consistency of the stones begins to change along its course, a consequence of wall-builders using the nearest available material while quarrying across a fault-line, so the wall becomes a kind of cross-section of the bedrock below us, and a timeline also, and after a few minutes of looking I almost convince myself that I can see the difference.

Whether or not this is even geologically true—and Armitage himself seems hesitant to accept the insight—the idea that fissures in the earth can be made visible in architecture is an implication worth contemplating, as if human spatial constructions, or, more importantly, the materials from which they’re made, can act as signs or perhaps symptoms for long-dead titanic events of incredible force and violence otherwise invisible inside the planet.

(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip!)