Resurrect.

This blog hasn't been updated for a while, and that's because I've been busy finishing up my design-cum-research thesis - and celebrating the fruits of my labour. I've been in Singapore for about three weeks now, and while thesis has been done and dusted, this blog will continue to document my various thoughts and processes - and potentially, research - on the subject matter.

Presentations at UCLA REMAP and NUS Department of Architecture went great; there's a presentation for NUS IDM soon. Check back shortly, for images and write-ups of my thesis project.

Anyway, was checking back on some emails that I glossed over, and came across one by Fabian, excerpted below:

"First as a starting point let's define Engaged Media as an art creation approach which encompasses the used of new technologies to generate processes and expressions focusing on presence and context as their essence. The presence of the author/authors and the subject/subjects and their dynamic relationship to the context of that presence are the foundations of Engaged Media.

Engaged Media does not exist separate from every day life but emerges from everyday life.

Engaged Media does not seek to produce aesthetic objects but to enable expressive systems.

Engaged Media embraces open imperfection and rejects enclosed perfection.

Engaged Media distributes creative capacity and opposes centralized power.

Engaged Media focuses on cultural specificity and disregards formulaic universality.

Engaged Media aspires to be of service and opposes neutrality."

Thought I'd document this in illustration that terms such as "Engaged Media" have no singular definition, and could possibly embody and engender so many different 'things', ideas and opinions. It begs for a constant search for definition, and this is what continually drives me.

Telepod

In one of the older posts, the Telepod was introduced. It is essentially a hemispherical pod on three legs, that allows for the park visitor - or anyone who is within its vicinity when it is placed in any part of the city - to experience media content that is immersive, and shown on the internal surface of its hemispherical top.

While the experience may be likened to being beneath a miniature Imax theatre, the means of information display is different. Conventional Imax theatres can accommodate for custom projectors due to their sheer size; the Telepod, which has limited standing room beneath (good for two or three heads), employs OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology instead. Using OLEDs removes the need for a projector, and allows for the projection surface to be malleable onto the hemispherical surface.

Projection/screen diagram of an Imax theatre, image courtesy of How Stuff Works.

The original intention of the Telepod were twofold:

1 As temporal shelters on the surface of the LA State Historic Park, where casual visitors can passively engage in media playback, on the park surface.

2 To allow for different parts of the city to experience the media content that is based in the LA State Historic Park. Thus, content that is generated (and stored in the downtown repository) can be played, via cable internet (or wi-fi where applicable), on the screens of these pods.

Their relatively simple structure and ease of portability allows for their distribution across the city, at news-stands, public parks, public libraries, bus stands and other spaces of temporal transit. This creates for multiple dialogues between the central park and points of the city extraneous to the park itself.

The media experience in the park, as such, extends beyond the physical boundaries of the park itself. This, at some level, bolsters the thesis intention of experiencing the city as an entity that goes beyond the bounds of physical infrastructure.

Evolution of the Reading of the City vs. Convergence Technology

The above sketch (click to enlarge) is an illustration of the evolution of the reading of the city with respect to the employment of convergence media. The top part of the sketch shows a timeline, which corresponds to a series of four sketches depicting how a city is read.

1 The first sketch illustrates how the current (generic) city is read, as a system of nodes, junctions, cross-streets (particularly in Los Angeles). The reading of the city obeys its physical infrastructure. Its urban forces - e.g. traffic flows, pedestrian circulation patterns, economic patterns arising from the accessibility of shop-fronts, and so on - can directly be mapped onto their relative positions with respect to these infrastructures.

2 The second sketch depicts the evolution of that urban environment after physical densification, which Los Angeles is employing as a strategy of connecting the "piecemeal" city. Yet, even while densification occurs, the existing infrastructures continue to bound the city, and the city continues to be read as an environment which is defined by existing physical boundaries.

3 With the introduction of GPS, cellphone and ubiquitous computing technologies, and the continued densification of the city, the urban environment continues to become more undefined. The difference is this - the physical city begins to lose its significance once the city is read as a series of nodal points, with GPS systems. The sense of hierarchy in the city becomes diluted, as locations are defined by vectorial relationships, coordinates, relative positions between points.

It is at this juncture that the Remapping LA project becomes highly relevant. The use of convergent technologies, coupled with the provision of the LA State Historic Park as the central media park, is definitive of the urban scenario where experiencing the city through media becomes as significant as navigating/reading the city through its physicality.

And as new media experiences are created, via the architectural employment of media environments, a new layer is added onto the city.

The involvement of the end-user as a contributor to that layer of the city, in effect, empowers the public. As it is human nature to control one's environment, this represents a channel for one to create a change in the mediascape that he experiences.

4 A continued trend of the employment and wide usage of convergence technologies would lead to a city whose hierarchies become dissolved, and whose urban environment is read through layers of media and "metadata".

Note: The sketches of the "evolution of the city" is an adaptation of Chip City, an architectural thesis project done at the Berlage Institute, published in Hunch 5. While the project in does not draw directly from the Chip City project, the parallels in the "spirit of the age" with regards to the role of convergence technology in the experience and interpretation of an urban environment cannot be denied.

architecture >> diagram >> re-architecture

One of the strategies to visualise how the information received from the content-generators (i.e. the end-users), insofar as the Remapping LA project is concerned, can be mapped onto a system which can then in turn be translated into real architecture that is experienced through space and time.

The diagram above illustrates a branch diagram of how information is sorted out once it enters a central repository. It gets sorted out through four main 'channels' of what could define one's culture, before being distributed into a more specific 'bin', or 'tag'. Thus, for example, a

The above diagram is not meant to be definitive diagram, but rather, to be seen as a strategy as to how information (or its distribution) can influence, or be translated into, how the architecture is organised. Given the multiple variations that can result from such a method of charting information, the architecture would in some sense have to be able to adapt to change. It would ideally be portable, programmable, and easily assembled depending on the nature of the information system by which it abides.

...

This, in a way, is a re-thinking, in that the architecture is predicated by the information distribution, rather than the other way around. It is a variation - and in some senses, a departure - from the originally-planned underground tunnel system, which was much more deterministic in its organisation. In that scheme, the nature of the pods (being partially or wholly underground) prevented for any variation in the information distribution system.

Yet, some common elements are taken through. The notion of journeying from one chamber to another via connecting wormholes still, very much, applies. The media chambers, whose walls act as projection screens, can still very much be employed.

The above is a set of spatial elements resulting from reading the diagram at the top of this post. Formal expressions aside, the entire park could well be formulated by a system of combinations of these elements.

...

An idea that came up for the media spaces came from an accordion structure (not the 'piano' and chord button aspects of the instrument, but the membrane and ribs structure), wherein the membrane expands to literally allow for more air to channel through.

The media spaces would ideally have an ethereal physical quality, with a sense of temporalness and with the possibility of being adapted to other sites. The sketches below illustrate, at a fundamental level, how cocoon-like structures which can expand and contract can be employed. Each cocoon comprises a series of steel 'O' frames, variably sized. These frames are attached to one another via hydraulic pipes, which can be programmed to expand and contract.

Wrapped over these frames would be two layers of skin. The internal skin, made of a semi-transparent polymeric material, would form the projection surfaces. The projectors would in turn be affixed, in strategic positions, onto the steel 'O' frames, and data would be fed to it via Bluetooth or wi-fi, whichever the prevailing technology.


A high volume of media that (proverbially) enters each media 'cocoon' would cause it to expand; this expansion would be controlled by software in the central server that would send signals to the inter-frame hydraulic pipes. A "high volume" of media would, for instance, be when the central repository receives a high amount of user-recorded content on a specific genre, say, art-related activities in Chinatown.

Conversely, a low volume of media would lead to the software instructing the hydraulic pipes to shorten, thereby reducing the size (and thus media space) of the cocoons. Naturally, the speed of the cocoons constricting or expanding would be at a pace that is non-hazardous to the visitors.

An overall landscape characterised by constantly-shifting forms (of media cocoons), highly organic-looking and with translucent skins, and dotted with 'Telepods' (see future post), would indeed provide for an interesting park experience.

Discussion with REMAP... of Physicality versus Temporalness

The discussion with Jeff and Fabian, while highly engaging and encouraging, raised several important issues which I will ponder over throughout the course of the thesis.

The primary issue of contention dealt with the dialectically-opposing nature of the park being underground versus it being left, as far as possible, physically unmolested. While Jeff and Fabian acknowledged that the "underground rhizomes/wormholes" idea is conceptually (and hypothetically) feasible, a key concern is that the implementation of such a design would probably not go down well with the communities living in the park's vicinity, who had fought for the preservation of the park land.

Perhaps the point was missed - the idea of taking it underground, with mounds on the surface suggestive of "life" underground, was in itself a critique on the highly built-up proposals which any developer who took over the site (and whom the communities so vehemently fought against) would consider. (See below.)

One of the earlier (farcical) proposals (external to REMAP) of using the site as an "opportunity site", maximising out its real estate potential with apartments and industrial buildings.

Yet, on further thought, it is indeed reasonable that whatever intervention on the park should not be too harsh on the existing site. After all, the etherealness in the way(s) in which media is read, consumed and interpreted would call for architecture that is seemingly ethereal, not just in terms of, say, play with architectural form and skin, but also, in terms of temporalness and portability.

Thus, a step back has to be taken, and a look into how the information flow between networks - between people, between different states of media, and so on - can be mapped onto physical space. The beginnings of this idea were addressed in the intention to interpret each underground rhizome / tunnel as a categorical tag (analogous to a tag for a Youtube video), but these were not systematised at this stage, nor was the idea clearly demonstrated.

In the next few weeks, that is what I shall address, before turning my thoughts again back to architectural form and space. Relationships between various entities and influencing forces will be addressed; diagrams will be mapped out. Only after that do spatial relationships come into the picture.

Wormholes

If a section were to be cut across the 'rhizomic forms' in the previous sketch, this would be how the spaces are:

The chambers find themselves underground and emergent, and are connected to one another via what I term "wormholes".

These connections can also be thought of as the food/water suppliants or channels from rhizome to rhizome, in the previous post. The wormholes/channels act as transporters of people from each chamber to the next, and in the process, enables them to transcend from one media space to another.

"In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that is essentially a 'shortcut' through space and time. A wormhole has at least two mouths which are connected to a single throat. If the wormhole is traversable, matter can 'travel' from one mouth to the other by passing through the throat.

While there is no observational evidence for wormholes, spacetimes containing wormholes are known to be valid solutions in general relativity."
(excerpted from Wikipedia)

(Above two images taken from Wikipedia)

The whole notion of travelling from one chamber to another, and emerging in a different "mediascape", appeals to me on more than one level. Infrastructurally, it could be a set-up for several things - an exposition, a labyrinth, or simply an interactive park as has been described so far.

The entire organisation of the chambers would be systematised. An early idea is to map over relationships between different categories of information onto the physical spaces, as per "tagging" on an on-line forum or on Youtube. Thus, each chamber would begin to display categorically-specific media. The wormholes, so to speak, could form the basis of "common relationships" between these categorical information tags.

(Far from transporting them in hyperbolic fashion, though, the park-goers have to walk through the wormholes themselves.)

Rhizome - the Botanical "Rhizome", and the Deleuze/Guattari, Jung "Rhizome"

This sketch is a conceptual development from the initial sketch. The underground chambers are now networked in a parallel series of (or a series of parallel?) rhizomic* spaces, each of which is an chamber, drawing back to the initial concept of the multi-faceted underground media spaces.

*In using the term rhizome, both the literal and philosophical meanings of the word are adopted. Formalistically, the sketch alludes to the lateral, underground growth of rhizome stems which are connected to one another by food/water channels which feed the entire rhizomic system, yet each stem can support itself independently if a food/water channel gets cut off.


The "rhizome" has been used as a concept and philosophical metaphor by Carl Jung, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Deleuze and Guattari allude to the rhizome as that which allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. In A Thousand Plateaus, they opposed it to an arborescent conception of knowledge. The arborescent conception defines a tree-like; a hierarchical system in which subjugates are branched off higher systems. It worked with dualist categories and binary choices.

A rhizome, given its multiple, non-hierarchical nature - recall that the botanical rhizomic system functions even when one stem is cut off - works with horizontal and trans-species connections, while an arborescent model works with vertical, linear and hierarchical connections.

Carl Jung alludes to the rhizome as that which remains after the ethereal has passed:

"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains." (Prologue from Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

Both concepts and allusions (by Deleuze/Guattari and Jung) are highly relevant to the conception of the project. Deleuze/Guattari's interpretation (and conception) of the "rhizome" certainly maps onto the foundations of the park (Remapping LA) project in itself, in that the entire organisation structure is non-hierarchical. The creation, sharing and distribution of data by park-users falls within this non-hierarchical framework as well, and the system remains self-sustaining even if one rhizome is incapacitated for whatever reason.

Jung's allusion to how the rhizome is self-sustaining and remains a fixed structure even as the ethereal is gone, is highly evocative as well. It parallels this project concept, in that the information generated by the users (videos, sounds, visuals, etc) is constantly dynamic, and more crucially, constantly replaced by new content. The impermanence of the information that finds itself on the surfaces (and hemispherical pods; refer to initial sketch) creates for an ever-changing visual landscape, which in effect can be read as ethereal. The permanence of the rhizomes, as static structures which support a dynamic set-up within it, alludes to Jung's description.

In the above sketch, parts of the chambers, at certain predefined points in the landscape (say, points which correspond to historical railway tracks than ran across the site) become emergent above the surface. These can be seen as mounds on the landscape (although I've been toying with the idea of having them as polycarbonate surfaces, which allows for the park user above-land to be able to observe the activity going on within the 'rhizomes'... more on that in a future sketch.)