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.)

Setting up the WAN @ Chiparaki

See also, "Networked Neighbourhood" post, 21 January 2007.

Wi-fi access points were set up at Chiparaki, an old ice-storage warehouse which now happens to be Fabian's residence/studio, currently the ad hoc (and in future, the permanent) "media lab" for the Remapping LA project.






In effect, the basic network infrastructure is being set up. Once the testing has been done, the access points will then be distributed throughout the whole area of the park, thereby creating a WAN that is exclusive to the park, served by a server at Chiparaki, and (potentially) remotely connected to UCLA via high-speed fibre-optics.

The set-up of the network provides the backbone for media exchange, whose implementations are key to the concepts of democratic data-sharing and cultural exchanges, which in themselves are foundations for the Remapping LA project.

Discussion with Dr Stephen Wittkopf... of Possible Technology Implementations

As part of a visit to various institutions in California (UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley) in late January, Dr Stephen Wittkopf, architecture professor and one of the IDM principal investigators, visited the REMAP studios and was introduced to the Remapping LA project, as well as other projects in REMAP's portfolio.

We managed to have a stimulating discussion on my project during the ride downtown (in a public bus, no less) and over coffee and lunch at the cafeteria in the Disney Concert Hall.

All in all, Dr Wittkopf was rather satisfied with my thoughts and concepts for the project. With regards to the architectural aspect, he was particularly happy with the idea of how the underground system becomes respectful of the existing landscape and allows for the park to be used as a mere "park", without any bombardment of sound, images etc if the user prefers it as such. Also, the philosophical and theoretical enquiries which preceded the sketch design were, in his opinion, relevant issues to address, and adequately compelling for a thesis project.

On the more technical level, the idea of using different media projections on various surfaces, in effect, makes these surfaces programmable architectural surfaces, and sensing technology can be embedded into these systems such that they become ambient intelligent interfaces. This is parallel to the idea of attaching miniscule RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags onto the surfaces, and having these surfaces detect the mobile device of the park user, and play content that is relevant to that user, accordingly.

The entire interactive park thereby could become a whole ambient intelligence network.

Being a lighting architect as well, he was also excited at the idea that multiple technologies can be employed onto the interior surfaces of the park, one of which could potentially be OLEDs (Organic Light Emitting Diodes).


Put simply, OLEDs are more energy-friendly than LCDs, primarily because they do not require a backlighting system. Also, the substrates for OLEDs are malleable, and hence can be adapted onto any surface. Short of going further into the details of OLEDs, you can read more about them here.

Indeed, these will be taken into consideration and would probably be helpful when I look at the technology implementation aspect of the thesis in time to come. For one, the employment of OLEDs removes the inherent problem of shadow-casting in conventional projections, when an obstacle comes in between the projector lens and the screen.

Discussion with Tay Kheng Soon... of Driving Forces and Manifestoes

Had a brief meeting with Kheng Soon over coffee downtown when he was in transit in LA, and had a chance to define and describe the project. At this stage, I was still trying to figure out the broad framework that would drive the project, and our discussion certainly helped in framing some thoughts into concrete driving forces for the project.

Kheng Soon highlighted the need to push for a thesis project that, from my interpretation, would be a manifesto for other future projects, anywhere in the world.

Concept Sketch v1.0

The sketch now shows, more clearly, the close-knit relationships between the data sharing infrastructures (via cell-phone or other WiFi-enabled mobile device) and the physicalities of the park. (Again, this remains at the conceptual level, and is only one of many, many possibilities of physical manifestations.)

Artificial trees which are integrated into the real landscape (and mimic real ones) are, quite literally, the source of life and light into the underground chambers. Fibre-optic cables, whose ends run from the 'tree' branches into the trunks and into the underground, allow for the underground chambers to be lit.

The hemispherical pods may be placed in other parts of the city extraneous to the park, say, in bus-stands, news-stands, public libraries and so on. Content from the park users can then be viewed within any pod, anywhere in the city, thereby expanding the boundaries of the media 'hinterland', i.e. the park.

Each facet within the interior surface of the underground chamber acts as a unique surface for a unique user. Strategic placement of projectors allows for every facet to display content, in a similar fashion as that in the pods, i.e. content which is foreign and disjunctive to the cultural background of the viewer.

The disjunction is aimed at education - insofar as the visual, aural and/or video content of other park users (which have been fed to the main server, through the WAN (Wide-Area Network) that has been set up at the park) with other cultural backgrounds would inform.

Cellphones and/or other Wi-fi enabled devices, seamlessly connected to the WAN at the park, are the end-user tools in this entire scheme of things. They are both information collectors and distributors, and their capabilities are augmented with larger-scale projections onto real surfaces, thereby allowing for content to be mapped onto a physical surface. This potentially allows for a new spatial environment to be created, one that is highly dynamic due to the flux in imagery and aural content that constantly changes.

(The cellphones illustrated are the N80 and N93 models from Nokia, which has provided 300 N80 phones to REMAP for testing purposes. The illustrations do not serve as any form of advertisement.)

Concept Sketch v0.5 - Physicality

This sketch examines one of my ideas (and one of many possibilities) for the interactive park.

This very preliminary design is borne out of several factors, the first of which involves the provision of multiple facets for a number of media projections to be effected. The underground chambers as suggested in the sketch would accommodate for these multiple facets, and, being underground, would allow for daytime use as well.

The landscape above-ground would be respectful to the landscape design by Hargreaves Associates, a San Francisco-based landscape design firm which has been commissioned to design the landscape for the park. (REMAP's involvement is the interactive media / technology aspect of the park.)

Hemispherical pods (see sketch) would dot the landscape above, allowing for a maximum of three people to fit under it. These can be thought of as micro iMax theatres. The video information that is projected onto the insides of the hemispherical surface would contribute to an immersive experience for the parkgoer.

The video that is shown on the inside surface of each pod is called up from a main server, housed in the Remapping LA lab downtown. When the user enters the hemispherical pod, information from his cellphone will be read and, from previous tagging of his identity, his background culture and ethnicity will be noted. The information that is fed to the user will not be that of his identity, in an attempt for him to familiarise with other communities that are surrounding the park. (There are four distinct communities - Chinese, Korean, Jewish and Latino - each of which is tightly bound within itself.)

Thus, the videos projected would be of the neighbourhoods and communities that are 'foreign' to the visitor's. (A censorship system detects potentially offensive content and removes them from the server; these systems are existent and will be documented in a future post.)

The intention is to provide for a data-sharing infrastructure and environment that is immersive, multi-layered, and most importantly, creates an awareness of other communities which one may not physically mingle with.

Networked Neighbourhood

Concurrent to conceptualising the park (for which Walt Disney Interactive R&D is involved as well), the REMAP team has been busy testing and setting up CISCO-sponsored wireless access points in the studio, and in Melnitz Hall, which houses the School of Theater, Film and Television, and which is also where REMAP is centred.

The set-up will then be implemented at the site of the LA State Historic Park, on the very large scale (32 hectares!). Once this set-up is complete, the entire park itself will be a connected Wi-fi hotspot, and in itself a WAN (Wide-area Network) which allows for user-tagging and other possibilities associated with GPSes (Global/Geographic Positioning Systems) and GISes (Geographic Information Systems), albeit at a smaller scale than a GPS. A server could then be placed at REMAP, UCLA as a "control station" for the network in the park.

The concept design of the park would, therefore, ideally make the most out of this infrastructure.

Evolution of Information Distribution

The notion of information distribution, and how this distribution is perceived at the user level, is inextricable with the concept of the interactive park. So far, I have envisioned it to be a real-world, a physical (or at least quasi-physical) YouTube, if you might, where video content, instead of being viewed and interpreted from a computer screen, becomes projected on-screen, or displayed on an installation such that it becomes immersive to the user.

The possibilities of having the architecture act as an infrastructure for themed content, or as a means of engaging the public to understand their city, and the myriad range of cultures within that city, underpins my thesis. The setting up of this infrastructure is of prime importance to REMAP as well, and will be briefly described in a future post.

The series of diagrams above depicts the evolution of the distribution of information. The diagram labelled '1' shows a hierarchical distribution, where information is distributed from a central source, and then sub-distributed, possibly through multiple layers and censures, before it reaches the 'grassroots' individual. This would also reflect the state of Negri and Hardt's 'Imperialism'.

The subsequent diagrams represent the decentralisation of the source of information, which creates different patterns in the way information is received, and therefore interpreted. Levels of censures will be lower (which may or may not be beneficial), but the individual begins to gain more autonomy in the amount and nature of information he receives.

Diagram '3' would be the stage at which the 'Empire' is.

As it were, the hierarchical distribution of information will become more indistinct, resulting in a constant flux of information distribution, redistribution and exchange, through multiple channels. The individual begins to gain power as he becomes the giver of information, as much as he is the receiver. This mirrors the condition of the 'Multitude'.

The same diagram can be used to illustrate the evolution of role of the architect - or any other profession - as one moves from an expertise-specific, closed environment to a multi-disciplinary environment. The architect becomes a node in a flat hierarchy, in a non-predefined system where "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." (Gilles Deleuze, 'Negotiations'.)

Each node, in itself, becomes a rhizome. In taking away one node, another will emerge, and the 'system' will continue to perpetuate.

Yet, the challenge of the multitude for the "social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different", i.e. the quest for diversity within multiplicity, remains.

Theoretical Underpinnings

Sketch relational diagram 1

Diagram showing relationships between IDM (NUS), REMAP (UCLA) and WDI. Finalised diagram pending.

Second Brainstorming Session with Walt Disney Imagineering

The second brainstorming session between REMAP and WDI (Walt Disney Imagineering) was held at the WDI R&D studios, Glendale, on 12 January 2007. A progression from the first meeting on 29 Nov 2006, the second brainstorming session was aimed at focusing on core ideas to be further developed for implementation in the summer of '07.

From the Agenda, some of the aims were to update all parties involved on the project progress, which has now included many more layers than in the previous meeting. For starters:
1. Cisco Systems has sanctioned the deployment of a wireless network covering the entire park site;
2. a 3D topographic model has been generated (see images below);
3. Nokia has sponsored 250 cell-phones for the community-participation aspect;
4. DWP (Dept. of Water and Power, LA) has agreed to support the project in the provision of cable and power infrastructure;
5. Classes conducted by Bruce Vaughn and Fabian Wagmister are underway, at UCLA.

Screenshot of point cloud data for site, viewed with Leica Geosystems' Cyclone

On a closer look (click to enlarge image), it becomes obvious that the surfaces are generated by a large number of dots. 'Join the dots', anyone?

The meeting was attended by REMAP's project participants in Remapping LA, key creative designers from WDI, as well as representatives from LA State Parks.

A congregation of creative individuals under one roof, each wanting to share his/her ideas and lay them on the table, meant that it was impossible to restrict the ideas into any specific focus. Nevertheless, the new ideas that were generated were indeed interesting, some of which are more refined than the ideas brought up in the previous meeting. Some examples (of my interpretation of the ideas):

• "media constellations" - network of interconnected media displays, whose topology would resemble that of constellations of stars;
  
• "media beacons" - large displays of media which encourage remote participation and interaction;
• overlays of maps on the physical park;
• "miniature LA" in which a virtual map of LA is projected onto the site, and visitors can visit the points of interest in the city virtually, both in space and time;
  
• content that represents, or recreates, the cataclysmic events that have shaped the history of LA - floods, fires, earthquakes;
• the rhythm of these events are organic and unplanned - could there be a possibility of employing the moving trains (passing alongside the site) as a medium of projection? This leads to...
  
• ...the creation of an anticipation amongst park visitors who are expecting something to happen on the surfaces of the moving trains;
• "metaphorical geophysical events" in which the media content portrays, within a theme, the history of the city;
• "time travel" concept, similar to previous concept but allowing the visitor to call up any point in time in history of the city, and vicariously experience it;
• "Mecano set" of miniature landmarks within the city, which allows children visiting the park to design an alternatice LA, a la SimCity, but in a real-life scale model;
• augmented reality environments which would cater for physically-immobile people, enabling them to visualise other happenings in the park.
  

Jeff Burke demonstrating the 3D model of the site

At some point in time, when we designers became too engrossed in speculating new ideas, it became more apparent that the focus on the community slowly faded into the background. At this, Fabian pointed out that the park is in fact for the community, particularly the Hispanic and Chinese migrant communities living adjacent to the park.

Four principles were laid out by Fabian, in his vision for the park:

• The consideration for the community.
• The park should be inspired by, based on, owned by and authored by the community, as well as historical events which defined the city.

• The assets in and around the park.
• The physical and built landscapes and infrastructure around the park should be maximised, or in the very least, considered, in the design of the interactive park.

• The dialectic between 'environment' and 'events'.
• The events that occur in the park should be complementary to its environment, and to the city of LA at large.

• The dialectic between 'elements' and 'activities'.
• The park elements should be designed with community activities in mind.

While the ideas were still preliminary, with the possibility of multiple interpretations, Fabian's insistence on the community aspect of the project was something that I very much welcomed. This is in line with my own principles on how the design of a park should be - the result of much dialogue between the designers (be they architects, storyboard writers and artists, content generators or media artists) and the communities that actually use the park. Likewise, the content should as far as possible be open-source.

Future meetings with WDI would involve smaller brainstorming sessions, with the aim of narrowing down to several key ideas, based on the several themes and principles above, and developing on them. This is with the aim of visualising these ideas. Further reviews would then decide if the ideas are indeed feasible.

It also affirmed my thoughts that for the purposes of my thesis project, the ideas were to serve as supplementary drivers for the project, rather than the primary driver. The discrepancy in the timelines for my own project and the overall project at large means that I have to push my thesis in a direction that, while running parallel to the overall scheme of things, would have to begin to take shape on its own.

In discussions with Kheng Soon and later Fabian and Jeff, the key concepts for my thesis began to crystallise. I intend the thesis to be a tripartite project comprising:

• a model of the NUS/REMAP/WDI collaborative effort, and collaborative efforts at large.
• a series of diagrams, proposals and key design concepts that illustrate the results of that collaboration.
• my own interpretations - and design - of what Remapping LA could be. (This would ideally be in tandem with the overall project's directions.)
  

SenseCam

This is an interesting development in photography - and data collection in general - taking images passively. It is a project of Microsoft Research, the research arm of the industry giants dealing with research in software engineering and computer science.

According to Microsoft, on its SenseCam website,

"SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn...

Unlike a regular digital camera or a cameraphone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in view of the wearer is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images. SenseCam also contains a number of different electronic sensors."

The camera itself adopts a nondescript, unassuming design, and perhaps rightly so. Its merits lie in its intrinsic concepts and technology, which allows images to be taken, through a fish-eye lens, with changes in body temperature, ambient lighting and other variables. Images can also be taken on a regular timed basis.

"SenseCam takes pictures at VGA (640 x 480) resolution... the time-lapse first-person-viewpoint sequences represent a useful media type that exists somewhere between still images and video... SenseCam also stores a log file, which records other sensor data along with their timestamps. Additional user data, such as time-stamped GPS traces, may be used in conjunction with the SenseCam data via time-correlation.

Once imported to a PC, files can be stored and manipulated in a simple image viewer application that we have developed. The basis of this viewer, which is designed to be very straightforward to use, is a window in which images are displayed, and a simple VCR-type control which allows an image sequence to be played slowly (around 2 images/second), quickly (around 10 images/second), re-wound and paused. The fast-play option creates a kind of ‘flip-book’ movie effect – the entire event represented by he images is replayed as a time-compressed movie...

An additional option is provided to correct for the ‘fish-eye’ lens effect using an algorithm which applies an inverse model of the distortion."

Read more about it here.

My thoughts on it are that it can certainly be a useful tool for the Remapping LA project, insofar as the data collection and information mapping stages are concerned. The "spartan" nature of the camera, and its small size, makes it convenient to wear.

Taking this one step further would be to incorporate the camera into a device which allows images to be taken from the viewpoint of the eye, rather than from the level of the chest (if slung around the neck), or hip (if attached to a belt loop). A simple non-obtrusive device can be fashioned to be either hung around the ears, or a more fashionable contraption can be designed, perhaps similar to Oakley/Motorola's bluetooth phone/MP3 player-cum-shades:


I'd be very much interested to design such a contraption, which would add another dimension (and scale) to the architectural/urban design component of Remapping LA. The implementation of an eye-level camera would, as mentioned above, enhance the level of realism for the visual information that is collected.

Kudos to Fabian for the link; images are from Microsoft, except the last image which is 'borrowed' from CNet.

Workspace

Melnitz Hall, UCLA, which houses the School of Theatre, Film and TV.

Hypermedia studio

REMAP office, where paperwork is done and meetings are conducted

In the News: Interactive digital media sector gets funding for 4 interlinked activities

S Ramesh, Channel News Asia, 10 January 2007. Some excerpts from the article.

SINGAPORE: Singapore's interactive digital media industry has been given a shot in the arm with the announcement that the sector's R&D Programme Office will fund four interlinked initiatives.

The initiatives were announced by Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan.

He said the initiatives aim to create a high-growth and self-sustaining eco-system which will propel Singapore into the forefront of research and development in interactive digital media.

The interactive digital media industry had been identified as a key growth sector for Singapore's economy in the years ahead by the high-powered Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council during its inaugural meeting last year, which was chaired by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

IDM at NUS logo, part of the digital media network in Singapore.

Giving details of the initiatives, Dr Balakrishnan said that firstly, the government will support intensive R&D at institutes of higher learning and research institutes and bring the best global interactive digital media R&D institutions to Singapore.

Secondly, the government will incentivise companies to push the boundaries of the industry's R&D through investment in infrastructure and innovative services...

Thirdly, Singapore aims to put itself at the forefront of R&D in interactive and digital media by establishing itself as a preferred port-of-call for partners in innovation-test bedding.

Fourthly, Singapore aims to encourage significant investments by companies in the media industry to anchor demand for interactive digital media.

Dr Balakrishnan noted that the interactive and digital media sector is large, with many sub-sectors and different stakeholders.

So far more than 30 stakeholders and partners from the sector have indicated their support and commitment to the R&D initiative. - CNA/ir

Also, see Singapore on its way to achieve Intelligent Nation vision by 2015.

Post-Empire Urbanisms

The following is an excerpt from an article written by Ed Keller for a class he is conducting at SCIArc, Post-Empire Urbanisms. While I am not enrolled in SCIArc, I believe much of what Keller contends resonates, to a large extent, with what I believe my thesis is dealing with.

Parallel Realities, Trans-national Archipelagos, New Urban Ambiences

"...Cities have historically functioned as 'ambient' environments, with many cultural, economic, political and aesthetic systems inflecting each other and creating complex urban ecosystems with lifespans in the centuries. The city comes to life through the overlapping ambiences it can host: either as a kind of software, in cultural movements, or a kind of hardware, in the physical forms of the architecture of the city itself. The unique nature and identity of any urban location emerges in an irreducible resonance that is produced between that 'software' and 'hardware'. In the case of the contemporary global city, the intensification of this relationship has produced a more radical set of bifurcations, no longer resolved as the outcome of a binary logic ('ambience'), yet rather as a monolithic temporal construct of parallel realities.

The political theorist Frederic Jameson argues that in contemporary post-capital/post-national society, the task of creating 'cognitive maps' of urban space and cultural landscapes has become substantially more complex. Today's development of geotagging, locative media systems and the like are symptomatic of a new genre of representation and communication that will radically transform the city.

The 'time' of the institution, which organizes a kind of monolithic memory structure on a political and cultural level, contrasts dramatically with the time of the individual subject, which is filled with myriad unpredictable details. Similarly, the 'time' of the built fabric of the city provides an archetypal and shared memory which spans all cultures, while the individual subject in their chance encounters creates an absolutely unique memory which then cascades into the urban form itself, in many ways. Urban morphologies are now on fast forward, as they adjust ever more rapidly to global systems that provide individuals, collectives, institutions with constantly shifting ways to interact.

Architecture operates as a key link in this dynamic relation, in its capability to slow down such time, unlike many other disciplines tied into the practice of generating urban morphology. This seminar will study these emerging 'Post-Empire' landscapes of control, systemic tendencies, and new freedoms."

Keller, Ed. Parallel Realities, Trans-national Archipelagos, New Urban Ambiences. 2007

The above preambles what I think is a challenge for the interpretation of our new urban environments. The turn of the century saw the embrace - with fear and admiration, and rejection in many cases - of the virtual as an extension to the real. The proliferation of technology has led to the virtual becoming an alternative to the real, in terms of how we interact and share.

The italicised statement above brings to light the following questions:

1 How does one perceive the virtual in the light of the real?

2 How do we employ technology such that the virtual augments the real, insofar as it may become an alternative reality in itself?

3 Granted that technology allows the creation of a personalised space (as defined by one's own interactions with mobile technology / computing interfaces), how does one perceive the physicalities / "form" of this personal space?

4 What happens when a network of such personalised spaces are created? Again, how does one perceive its "form"?

5 How do we 'remap' the structure of a city in a way that effects in the production of a collective consciousness of the multitude?

6 Taking that a step further, how can diversity be maintained, or even brought to the forefront, in this collective consciousness? What might the technological means to do this be?

These thoughts will be the core questions as I pursue my thesis.

The Project Site

To be furnished...

LA of the future

The following is something that recently made its way into the architecture headlines here in LA.

Eric Owen Moss has recently won a state-wide competition on the visions for the city of Los Angeles of the future. The public now gets to choose their favourite of three cities - New York, Chicago and Los Angeles here.

Here's a bit more on Moss's future vision of LA, from The History Channel's Engineering an Empire:

"The primary organizational components that define contemporary Los Angeles are enormous works of civil engineering - the railway tracks and bridges; the power grids; the "v" shaped, concrete L.A. River; and the ubiquitous steel and concrete freeways.

The infrastructure, when successful, solves the technical objectives of its design engineers: moves trains; moves power; moves water; moves cars.

But in Los Angeles technical means often become both visual ends and operational limits the original problem solvers never imagined. The cumulative effect of the existing infrastructure is to sub-divide the city, delimit zones of use and purpose, and to segregate by race, and economic capacity.

The freeways, tracks, power grids, and concrete rivers originally designed to connect a horizontal city, often deliver the opposite: the piecemeal city, with infrastructure as a consistent obstacle to the integration of the disparate civic parts.

The solution: reconceive the city by multiplying the purposes of its infrastructure. We intend to build over, under, around, and through the freeways, rivers, power grids, and tracks, to use the existing rights of way as the foundations for a series of new, infrastructure-scaled conceptions of building form, habitation, and public and private purpose that will redefine Los Angeles by strategically re-associating the sociologies, the uses, and the sense of the civic whole the civil engineers have long precluded."

While Moss Architects are probably not the first to have identified Los Angeles's urban problems, the italicised paragraphs succinctly underline my personal observations of the city. The civil engineering efforts in constructing the city's transportation infrastructure (in particular, freeways) have done more damage in cutting up the city into "piecemeal" fragments, rather than linking up the sprawling sub-cities / suburban centres.

Somewhere at the back of my head lies the intention of using Remapping LA as a stage for critiquing this phenomenon, and perhaps as a means of alleviating the situation (although given its own location - disjointed from other parts of downtown LA by virtue of the rail lines and the LA river that borders it - this would require a masterplan that would involve the site's vicinity as well.)

The State Historic Park, for instance, could be conceived of as a microcosm of the city's distinct cultures, sans the boundaries that segregate present-day Los Angeles.

In re-reading the final paragraph of the above blog quote though, it is difficult to conceive how the problem can be solved by multiplying the agents of the initial problem. It seems, on first impression, like a megalomaniacal architect's pipe dream - of designing more than what might be necessary, in the hopes of further saturating the city with built transportation infrastructure that may now further segregate the city on not just a horizontal plane, but on the vertical plane as well.

Here are the images from the above website:

From the rendered perspectives and physical models, what seems to be the design intention, at least as far as the formal solution appears to be, is to saturate the riverine banks with high density development, in the hopes of creating urban vibrancy that might more clearly define the metropolis that Los Angeles is, or at least allow it to fall within the conventions of a metropolis. Gargantuan arching forms over the city's urban layer are reminiscent of what the post-modernist Archigram movement would do, albeit in a different setting and with a different formal language.

While there seems a clear-cut aim of intensifying the city by means of urban form, and in pushing for, in reviewer Daniel Libeskind's words, "a big urbanist idea in which habitation, public and private space are fused together in order to create a civic whole; one which has eluded the piecemeal construction of the city", it remains to be seen how such a future city would address the segregation of cultures that, if left uncontrolled, could lead to eventual dystopia.

My comments right now might be premature, given the following: my take on it is purely founded on observation of low-resolution images, and that the project itself is a concept-in-progress. Yet it is my aim that the strategy for the LA State Historic Park in the Remapping LA project would involve community participation - or at the very least, a consideration of the communities - for the design of the interactive park.

NTT Docomo's Keitai City ideas competition

'Keitai' City

iPod owners may disagree with this statement, but the keitai (Japanese term for, and hereafter, "cellphone") is undeniably the indispensable portable device of the past decade. NTT Docomo, the top mobile operator in Japan, organises an annual architectural design competition, with slightly varying themes, focusing on how (in my interpretation) the cellphone can be thought of as a tool for one to interact with others, and with his own space.

(I interpret the term 'keitai'/cellphone as 'convergence devices' - PDAs, blackberries, handheld PCs. For the sake of convenience, they will be referred to as 'cellphones' in this post.)

The 2005 competition website poses the rather general question:

"How is the city, our immediate environment, developing under these circumstances [presented by the ever-emerging use of the cellphone]? In times of great change, the city, in keeping with, or in critical reaction to, that change, has also undergone changes of guise or structure. What sorts of conditions will the city generate in the future, as the [cellphone] becomes an integral part of our lifestyle?"

In a discussion (full article here) between Kiyohito Nagata, Vice President of NTT Docomo and Managing Director of its Product Department, and Kengo Kuma, world-renowned architect, recurring themes of blurred boundaries between real and virtual architectures and infrastructures persist. Some interesting thoughts:

"Recently there has been a great deal of discussion about how to prevent leaks of personal information. If you drop your [cellphone], then you lose an enormous amount of personal information. This is the kind of problem that might be solved if we changed our ways of thinking, including our thinking about cities and space." Nagata

"If you look at the keitai as something that blends in together with people and spaces, then spaces will become more attractive and new spaces and systems will emerge to make life more enjoyable." Nagata

On the role of the architect in designing information / computational networks, Kuma contends:

"In the urban style of communications, when you want to meet your friend you get on a train and go see him. But you can also communicate by connecting through your keitai. If the rail network is an infrastructure, then you could also call the 'keitai' an infrastructure. In the 1960s, it was thought that cities should be approached in terms of their infrastructure. Since the 1970s there has been a reaction to that in architecture – an atmosphere of nihilism stemming from a feeling of powerless and the difficulty as an architect to make any progress with large urban plans. The dominant feeling has been that to discover where you should be going as an architect you should concentrate on designing small-scale architecture. The keitai has changed all that. Now seems to be our chance to change cities from their infrastructure."

The last paragraph might seem to suggest that Kuma is validating the role of the architect in the design of invisible infrastructures; therein lies a deeper consciousness of social awareness and the intention to seize the chance to "change cities from their [invisible] infrastructure(s)". While this may not be a completely new breakthrough in architectural discourse pertaining to real and virtual infrastructures, it represents a clear intention to push the boundaries of the assumptions associated with virtual infrastructures and networks. The organisation of such a competition (with a highly lucrative monetary incentive, no less!) can only be a good thing, with regards to idea- and content-generation.

The winning entry:

(Image copyright of NTT Docomo)

According to the winners:

"The telephone rings. The keitai is opened, like opening an umbrella when it begins to rain. A space floats above the person talking on the telephone, changing in shape and size according to the volume and tone of their voice. People talking on the telephone separate themselves to ensure that the surrounding people do not collide with the space. From the shape of the space visible above people making telephone calls, the surrounding people can spy on their condition.

When speaking on a keitai, although separate from the person on the phone, there is a sense of togetherness, and the feeling of actual space fades. At the same time, the surrounding people feel a slight sense of alienation. The intervening space (empty space) with the person on the phone has no substance, but by temporarily visualizing it in the space above the person calling, the awkwardness of the sense of place in the city, instigated by the appearance of the keitai, is softened."

(It is becoming more apparent that there does not seem to be a literal English translation for 'keitai' - it seems it could mean 'cellphone' and the network that is covers a cellphone.)

Other entries which piqued my interest (in no particular order; images are not mine, but NTT Docomo's):


The explanation for the above project, which I think leaves very much up to one's interpretation, goes:

"Palette city

Currently, the diffusion of the keitai is reported to have reached 80% of the population. If the enabled area of telephone reception is an urban region, there is almost 100% coverage, and it has become an important tool in influencing the behavior of modern people.

Accordingly, taking the eaves of buildings as the starting point, out-of-range areas are scattered throughout the town. For an environment in which the keitai is always enabled, we consider the presence or absence of electromagnetic waves to be an element for composing a new locality.

The intention is to give rise to a variety of places in the town due to the relationship between the place and the tool."

Conceptually, it is a neat idea - of defining space by the intensity of electromagnetic waves that are present (ostensibly by virtue of whether a cellphone is in use, or not). Such a space would necessarily be very dynamic and undefined - like a flux. Graphically, the project illustrates 'blobs' of spaces within the 'hinterland' of the electromagnetic waves generated in a cellphone conversation. These blobs fall within a fixed city infrastructure, with the walls of the building torn down / opened up (or at least, not considered). As a graphic image, it sends a strong message on the potential of dynamic, flux spaces taking over our perceptions of a city's spaces (or its cityscapes) as that which is traditionally defined by brick and mortar.

On to more winning entries:

"Information is provided as a continuous stream to mobile phones (like a webpage banner). Businesses purchase these rights to provide information about its services and products to all the mobile users in a designated area. This real-time information empowers individuals to proactively choose goods and services. This results in a flexible building that is determined by on-the-minute consumer demand."

"Digital fields in the keitai city follow urban forms; distance and space give relevance to information, forming a connection between the virtual and the real. The keitai contains its owner's preferences and attributes. It modulates and interacts with digital fields and other keitai - creating personalised cities."

Conceptually, the above entry resonates the most with my initial ideas for the Remapping LA project, in particular, its focus on the specificness of the owner's "preferences and attributes" to his mobile device. The projection of images or video content onto a virtual surface, as suggested in the collages in the entry, is resonant to my ideas of transient displays for the LA project as well.

"Invisible noise.
This proposal is keen on the perception of innumerable radio waves that exist in urban settings. We use the mobile phone daily, but are unable to perceive the existence of corresponding radio waves. They are visualised using the nature of light and radio waves that travel at the same speed. We intend for the space to become a place to realise that the imperceptible element in our space has actual transfer and movement." (language edited)

The above entry is reminiscent of light installations done by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, or the technique used to visualise invisible laser beams by blowing powder (a la Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment).

Thus, what originates as a rather mundane, yet challenging, question leads to several interesting ideas that definitely bear potential for further development and realisation. Parallels can be drawn between some of the concepts that have been visualised in the above proposals and some of the ideas that have been brought up in the REMAP brainstorming sessions, including those which I have a vested interest in.

See the full proposals and results here.