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 Artist Florian Dombois's Auditory Seismology project plays you the sound of earthquakes. Using time-compression to accelerate the vibrational waves of global seismic activity, Dombois makes landscape events audible to human ears. Specifically, he writes, "if one compresses the time axis of a seismogram by about 2000 times and plays it on a speaker (so called ' audification'), the seismometric record becomes hearable and can be studied by the ear and [by] acoustic criteria."  In this map of global tectonics, for instance, you can listen to the weird, rubbery snapping of plate boundaries. Dombois: "The sound of earthquakes at spreading zones differs much from earthquakes at subduction zones. Whereas earthquakes produced by plates that are drifting against each other appear as sharp and hard beats, an earthquake from a parting mid ocean ridge sounds more like a plop."  Meanwhile, Dombois also introduces us to the sonic seismicity of southern California, where the aftershocks of 1994's Northridge quake sound like loose bits of metal banging against the side of a speeding bus. Then we go to Japan, whose plentiful subterranean dislocations come out like snaps of a drum. Finally, of course, we confront distance (the graph, featuring Earth's surface, mantle, and core, that appears at the top of this post). Clicking on the seismic stations listed round that graph, you get short ambient works that weave together to form endless varieties of terrestrial drones. Click on more than one at the same time, and you can waste whole minutes of your life tuning faultlines and making dissonant chords of plates; the earth becomes your instrument. Dombois's exhibition of Auditory Seismology closes November 18th, at the galerie rachel haferkamp in Cologne. (Thanks, Alex! Earlier: Fault Whispers, Dolby Earth, resonator.bldg, Sound dunes, and, to some extent, Podcasting the sun).
 [Image: Resembling the birth, or perhaps death, of the universe under studio lights – or a black & white alternate ending to The Fountain – this is a sculpture by Michel Blazy from 5 Billion Years Later, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, photographed by booce. The image is best seen in its original size].
 Going on right now in a New York City near you is Payphone Warriors: "You and your teammates must dash across the blocks around Washington Square Park in a bid [to] control as many payphones as possible. You simply make a call from a payphone to the game system and enter your team number to capture a phone. For each minute your team controls that phone the team scores one point. Grab more phones for more points."  And if someone complains that they actually need to use that phone... you know what to do. (Brought to you by Abe Burmeister of Abstract Dynamics).
 [Image: The surface of the earth peeled away to reveal rock and fissures – a perfect excuse for one of my favorite quotations: "Look down well!" Jules Verne once wrote. "You must take a lesson in abysses." Image produced by R.C. McDowell, G.J. Grabowski, and S.L. Moore for the U.S. Geological Survey; this is Kentucky. An alternative map, by A.C. Noger, is no less topo-optically extraordinary]. (Earlier: BLDGBLOG's Topographic Map Circus – although most of the links in that post are now broken).
 [Image: Tativille; a scene from Playtime. As Jacques Tati later explained, "there were no stars in the film, or rather, the set was the star, at least at the beginning of the film. So I opted for the buildings, facades that were modern but of high quality because it’s not my business to criticise modern architecture" – it was only his job to film it].The idea that an abandoned film set could be archaeologically mistaken for a real city, ten, twenty, even a thousand years in the future, has popped up on BLDGLBOG before. However, it turns out that there's an equally interesting story to be found in Tativille, the instant city and film set built for Jacques Tati's now legendary Playtime. "Tativille came into existence," we read in this PDF, "on the 'Ile de France' on a huge stretch of waste ground [in Paris]": Conceived by Jacques Tati and designed by Eugene Roman, it was strictly a cinema town, born of the needs of the film: big blocks of dwellings, buildings of steel and glass, offices, tarmacked roads, carpark, airport and escalators. About 100 workers laboured ceaselessly for 5 months to construct this revolutionary studio with transparent partitions, which extended over 15,000 square metres. Each building was centrally heated by oil. Two electricity generators guaranteed the maintenance of artificial light on a permanent basis. During pre-production, "Tati visited many factories and airports throughout Europe before his cinematographer Jean Badal came to the conclusion that he needed to build his own skyscraper. Which is exactly what he did." In fact, he built Tativille: an entire city inhabited by no one but actors – who left after each day of filming. One estimate puts the total mass of built space and material at "11,700 square feet of glass, 38,700 square feet of plastic, 31,500 square feet of timber, and 486,000 square feet of concrete. Tativille had its own power plant and approach road, and building number one had its own working escalator." Those hoping to visit the set's cinematically Romantic remains are out of luck: "I would like to have seen it retained – for the sake of young filmmakers," Tati claimed, "but it was razed to the ground. Not a brick remains."  [Image: Tativille; from Playtime].Notes for future screenwriters (who credit BLDGBLOG): in the summer of 2009 a delightful Ph.D. candidate from Columbia University, studying architectural history and writing her thesis on the lost sets of mid-20th century French cinema, will fly to Paris for three months. There, she rents a flat near the Seine, sketches buildings in blue ink on cafe napkins, reads Manfredo Tafuri, then sets up her most important interviews – but all is not well. She has strange dreams at night; she thinks she's being followed; she has a mysterious run-in at the Musée D'Orsay; and she begins to suspect, upon deeper research, that Tativille wasn't destroyed after all... Till, one day, in a beautifully shot scene at the French National Library – all weird angles and reflective glass walls – our heroine discovers that a small note has been slipped into her jacket pocket. The note is actually a map, however, with directions addressed solely to her. For, outside the city, in an arson-plagued banlieue, an old cluster of import warehouses silently waits. She takes the train – and a small pocket-knife. Then, standing alone inside one of those warehouses, torch in hand, she finds – (Thanks, Nicky! Of earlier interest: City of the Pharaoh).
 A bunch of new Archinect t-shirts arrived this week. The three pictured above are my personal favorites – but check 'em out for yourself. Then buy ten thousand. Clothe an army with them. Wear one to bed. Run marathons in it. Wash cold. (Note: Title is a reference to this post).
 [Image: Emiliano Granado, Night 1].Two months ago, Ballardian interviewed J.G. Ballard – something previously linked and summarized here – but now, insanely, BLDGBLOG has the wildly flattering privilege of being interviewed itself – joining Ballard, Bruce Sterling, and Iain Sinclair, among others. Over the course of the interview, Simon Sellars and I talk about J.G. Ballard's novels, from Concrete Island to Super-Cannes, The Drowned World to Crash – not to mention High-Rise – and we get there via a look at corporate office parks, Richard Meier, science fiction, Le Corbusier, the Paris riots, Archigram, Norman Foster, Sigmund Freud, sexual deviance, Daniel Craig, gated communities, the Taliban, Victor Gruen, future flooded Londons in the era of nonlinear climate change, Steven Spielberg, sports-car dealerships, Margaret Thatcher's son, public surveillance, Rem Koolhaas...  [Image: Emiliano Granado, Environments 2].Etc. Read how speculative architectural treatises are actually "an extremely exciting, if totally unacknowledged, branch of the literary arts. Look at Thomas More’s Utopia. Or China Miéville. Or, for that matter, J.G. Ballard." Discover how "the buildings and cities and landscapes in Ballard’s novels are more like psychological traps built by management consultants – not architects – who then fly overhead in private jets, looking down, checking whether their complicated theories of human cognition have survived the test. Where ‘the test’ is the world you and I now live in." Learn how "perhaps manufacturing AK-47s is the only way to liven things up." Argue whether or not "the problem with architecture is that it’s still there in the morning; you can’t turn it off." While you're at it, gaze upon the fantastically Ballardian photography of Emiliano Granado, whose work both accompanies the interview and appears here.  [Image: Emiliano Granado, Environments 11].Then join commenter #1, at the end of the interview, in disagreeing already with what I have to say... And have fun. (Earlier, J.G. Ballard-inspired posts on BLDGBLOG: Concrete Island, Bunker Archaeology, 10 Mile Spiral, Silt, The Great Man-Made River, White men shining lights into the sky, Cities of Amorphous Carbonia – and so on).
 Thanks to a perceptive reader, the Statoil ads that originally inspired BLDGBLOG's Offshore post have been located. So here they are...     You're looking at offshore, utopo-stilted versions of Russia, Rome, New York, Baku, and the Sahara. Design enough of these and you could probably get an M.Arch. degree... All images by McCann. (Via elisabethsblog – with huge thanks to Joakim Skajaa. And don't miss Offshore).
 The Economist reports today that the SW London borough of Richmond "is taking radical steps to curb greenhouse-gas emissions": In October its Liberal Democrat council announced a plan to price parking permits according to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by residents' vehicles. If the council passe[d] the proposal in a vote [that happened yesterday], the cost of an annual permit for cars in Band G – the worst polluters, such as SUVs, Renault Espaces and Jaguar X-Types – will triple to £300 ($568) from January 2007. Band A electric vehicles would be allowed to park for nothing; Band B cars, such as the hybrid Toyota Prius, would get a 50% reduction. Residents owning more than one vehicle would have to pay another 50% for each extra car. Thus a household with two Band G cars would see its annual parking bill rise from £200 to £750. The article is quick to add that "Richmond residents emit more carbon dioxide per head than any other Londoners." (Earlier: Drive Britannia).
It seems that "a pair of shiny, stainless-steel spheres measuring 7 feet in diameter and standing 50 feet apart" will soon be installed in a new San Diego park by artists Po Shu Wang and Louise Bertelsen. Together, the spheres will "enable visitors to 'eavesdrop' and monitor the earthquake fault" that cuts diagonally through the city. From the San Diego Union-Tribune: A small microphone lowered into a tube ending near the fault would transmit the sounds of typical, infinitesimal subterranean movement. The sound, which the artists would make audible to humans, could be heard in the park through a loudspeaker mounted inside a cone-shaped opening in the sphere. In addition, they plan to use new cell-phone technology to connect the mike to an international communications system. People all over the world could "dial up" to hear what the artists call "fault whispers." (Story via The Dirt. Earlier: resonator.bldg, in which we learn that a man "equipped with seismometers... can turn architectural structures into giant musical instruments and demolish buildings with sound alone." See also Dolby Earth).
Will " a swarm of umbrellas" protect the Earth from global warming? Roger Angel, at the University of Arizona, apparently hopes so. In Angel's plan, "a trillion miniature spacecraft, each about a gram in mass and carrying a half-meter-diameter sunshade... would act as a mostly transparent umbrella for the entire planet."  [Image: The anti-sun space-umbrella cloud, by Roger Angel. Because of the cloud, sunlight is "spread out, so it misses the Earth" – leaving everyone down here pale and confused (but free of global warming)].The whole thing "could be deployed in about 25 years at a cost of several trillion dollars," and it "would be accelerated into space by a large magnetic field applied along 2,000-m-long tracks. With each such launch sending out 800,000 flyers, the project would require 20 million launches over a decade." According to EurekAlert!, this actually means "launching a stack of flyers every 5 minutes for 10 years." So will this flying sun-cancellation machine really go live? Shouldn't we perhaps use derelict buildings instead, hurling gigantic anti-sun clouds of ruined architecture into space – empty tower blocks and football stadia and Thames Water filtration plants, all blocking out the harmful rays? Sunlight passing through the windows of churches casts shadows on farms, affecting harvests... and the temperature on earth will never change. (Via Roland Piquepaille, on a tip from Bryan Finoki).
"At the new Winvian resort in Litchfield County, Conn.," the New York Times reports, "you can spend the night in a restored 1968 Sikorsky Sea King helicopter, so tricked out that Austin Powers might have piloted it. That’s a 17,000-pound mix of the plush and the industrial, of chilled Champagne and crystal waiting atop a stainless-steel fridge alongside an aerospace dashboard."  [Image: A screen-grab from the Winvian website].The Winvian isn't open yet, on the other hand – and it's priced well out of most holiday budgets. At up to $2000 a night, you'd expect more than just complimentary champagne; perhaps your hotel room can actually take off and rock you to sleep over the Litchfield Hills... When the hotel does open up – on January 1st, 2007 – visitors will get to choose from amongst "18 cottages designed by 15 architects. Each cottage is conceived around a Connecticut theme: besides Helicopter (Sikorsky builds them in Stratford), others include Beaver Lodge, Camping Cottage, the Treehouse, Secret Society and Industry." Rumor has it, there's also a reproduction Hedge Fund Management Office and the much-anticipated George W. Bush Cocaine Suite. Ah, Connecticut...  [Image: A screen-grab from the Winvian website].BLDGBLOG will gladly accept offers of a few nights' stay. (Earlier: Resort Hotels of the Stratospheric Future!)
 Arcadia by Invertebrate is a project "assembled from images that share the tag 'arcadia' in an online photo-sharing website." Effaced, cropped, combined, and altered, the images then serve as surreal maps of earthly paradise: a stereotyped landscape of personal leisure, backyards, and harmless wildlife, all in the shadow of distant mountain ranges.    Fascinatingly, these are the source images from which Invertebrate built the project.  How would it look, I wonder, if you used the word "prison" as your tag, instead – or "suburb," "home," or, for that matter, "paradise"? What about "office" or "hospital" or "factory"? Or, less architecturally, something like "police"? In any case, don't miss Borderville, Invertebrate's earlier and tactically similar project, featured on BLDGBLOG several months ago. For Borderville, "Invertebrate posted a request to the online film community for the titles of movies featuring border crossings. Borderville is assembled out of objects ripped from these movies." ( Borderville, and Invertebrate, first discovered via Cabinet Magazine).
 [Image: Jens Liebchen].
Lens Culture introduces us to German photographer Jens Liebchen's series DL07: stereotypes of war.
For the project, Liebchen "constructed a series of black-and-white photos of a city under seige [sic] – menacing helicopters buzzing abandoned buildings, furtive figures scrambling down deserted streets, smoke-filled skylines, blood-stained walls and sidewalks, too-young children armed with machine guns… Yet he took all of these photos in a city (Tirana, Albania) while it was at peace."
  [Images: Jens Liebchen].
More at Lens Culture.
 "About 120 miles east of Albuquerque, on the eastern edge of the town of Santa Rosa, N.M., lies a tiny oval of blue water—a spring-fed sinkhole about 80 feet wide and 81 feet deep—known as the Blue Hole. Sometime ago a group of scuba divers dove into the Blue Hole, eager to explore every nook and fissure of the smooth-walled sinkhole. After climbing out, they realized one of their divers had disappeared. Six months later, the body of that diver finally surfaced, but not in Santa Rosa. It was discovered, the story claims, in Lake Michigan—more than a thousand miles away—naked, waterlogged and with much of its skin scuffed off, as if it had been pushed and scraped through miles of rocky tunnels." The one, terrible word BLDGBLOG was gouged into his flesh...
(Story via Warren Ellis; image via Wikipedia).
 [Image: Courtesy of Statoil].
I was flipping through a copy of Archive the other night when I came across a spread of recent print ads by Norwegian oil giant, Statoil. The ads featured cities and skyscrapers and the Roman Colosseum all Photoshop'd perfectly onto offshore oil derricks; they looked like instant and futuristic offshore micro-utopias – or perhaps even some weird, mechano-robotic version of Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead.
 [Image: Arnold Böcklin].
In any case, I wanted to post the ads here – but all I could find online were Statoil's own press images. Those, however, induced a kind of minor panic attack, as the offshore structures they document easily rival, and possibly surpass, the most far-fetched architectural speculations of Constant Nieuwenhuys.
   [Images: Constant vs. Statoil].
So here are some photos – and anyone who runs across online versions of the Statoil ads, let me know.
   [Images: Courtesy of Statoil].
These next two shots were actually taken inside the legs of one of the derricks; as such, the photographer is standing below sealevel.
  [Images: Courtesy of Statoil].
But then I got to thinking how, toward the beginning of The Aeneid, we read that Aeneas and his crew have been tossed about by a string of storms and bad navigation, moving island to island against their will:
For years
They wandered as their destiny drove them on
From one sea to the next... They are accidental exiles, always docking on the wrong shore.
 [Image: Courtesy of Statoil].
Unsurprisingly, Aeneas is soon fed up with trying "[t]o learn what coast the wind had brought him to," so he confronts a random islander – not realizing that it's actually his mother (his mom happens to be Venus, and she likes to wear disguises). He demands:
Tell us under what heaven we've come at last,
On what shore of the world are we cast up,
Wanderers that we are, strange to this country,
Driven here by wind and heavy sea. Etc. etc. – it's the endless drama of origin and detour.
My point is simply: how might the Aeneid have been different if the Mediterranean Sea they'd explored had actually been full of oil derricks, a manmade geography of machine-islands, industrialized stilt-kingdoms each more fantastic than the rest – and so they'd set sail beneath the anchored legs of support understructures and maintenance gantries, roping up their ships for the night in the shadow of artificial hills and disguised islands? An Aeneid for the machine age.
  [Images: Courtesy of Statoil].
More practical questions include the reuse of these structures: what unintended future functions might these aging derricks be repurposed for? Once their fields run dry, will they be left standing till inevitable collapse? Or will a maritime preservation movement swoop in to save them?
Further, will corporate tax havens of tomorrow be built at sea, in private archipelagos of platform-cities, an experimental terrain for new concepts of financial sovereignty?
[Note: Just to be absolutely clear here, all images of oil derricks used in this post come courtesy of Statoil].
 [Image: A passing Illinois lightning storm and supercell, the clouds peeling away to reveal evening stars; photo ©Extreme Instability/Mike Hollingshead. If you can overlook pet photos, meanwhile, don't miss Hollingshead's other storm work from 2006 and 2005 – including these Nebraskan auroras. While you're at it, this storm sequence has some stunning, pre-storm landscape shots].
During a disastrously moderated talk at the MAK Center last night in West Hollywood, where the panelists could hardly get a word in edgewise because of the barely coherent, self-answering, 40-minute monologue of the moderator, Karl Chu briefly managed to say that he was interested in constructing and designing whole continents and weather systems.
Which got me thinking.
Given time, some digging equipment, a bit of geotechnical expertise, and loads of money, for instance, you could turn the entirety of greater Los Angeles into a weather bowl, dedicated to the recreation of famous storms. Install some rotating fans and open-air wind tunnels, build some deflection screens in the Hollywood Hills, scatter smaller fans and blowers throughout Culver City or overlooking Burbank, amplify the natural sea winds blowing in through Long Beach – and you could re-enact famous weather systems of the 18th and 19th centuries, reproducing hurricanes, even bringing back, for one night, the notorious storm that killed Shelley.
You consult your table of weather histories, choose your storm and go: fans deep in hillsides start turning, the wind tunnels roar, and lo! The exact speed and direction of Hurricane Andrew is unleashed. Seed the clouds a bit and reprogram the fans, and you can precisely reproduce the atmospheric conditions from the night William Blake was born. Or the ice storm that leveled electrical gantries outside Montreal, now whirling in a snow-blurred haze through Echo Park.
You could build competing weather colosseums in London, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Beijing. Every night new storms are reenacted, moving upward in scale and complexity. The storm Goethe saw as a nineteen year-old, contemplating European history, kills a family of seven outside Nanking. You soon get Weather Olympics, or a new Pritzker Prize for Best Weather Effects.
One day, a man consumed with nostalgia hacks the control program to recreate the exact breeze on which he once flew a kite over the Monbijouplatz in Berlin...
(For more on the construction of continents, see The Transgondwanan Supermountain. For more on the exhibition now up at the MAK Center, download this PDF).
 [Image: The old tower blocks of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, transformed by demolition into totem pole-like wind instruments, flute-ruins, a musically-active wasteland whistling to itself behind security fences. Photographer unknown; spotted at Archinect. It seems worth briefly pointing out, however, that Cabrini-Green could instead have been architecturally salvaged and later reused—and, given a different economic model, the towers could also have been refurbished. Indeed, through that latter link we learn that the combined weight of London's existing tower blocks is an astonishing forty million tons—meaning that high-rise building materials constitute a near-geological presence in many cities, and they should not simply go to waste...].
Wired reveals what "a permanent presence in the ocean" might look like, if that "presence" consisted entirely of manmade submersibles.  [Image: From Wired].This underwater robotic metropolis is otherwise known as the NEPTUNE Project. Specifically, Wired writes, the project "would string 10 semiautomated geobiological labs across the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off Washington, 8,000 feet underwater. Each would have cameras, lights, robots, and sensors, all connected to the surface via optical cable to transmit data on everything from the biomass of microbes to the effects of ocean temperature on weather." According to the project's own website, the "goal is for NEPTUNE to appear as a seamless extension of the global Internet, connecting users anywhere on shore to the sensors on the seafloor."  [Image: A future seafloor exploratorium. Image provided courtesy of the NEPTUNE Project and produced by CEV].As Space.com reported back in 2003, "the network itself will cover a region roughly 310 miles by 620 miles (500 kilometers by 1,000 kilometers) in size. More than two dozen experimental sites will form nodes along the sub-sea cable system. Nodes will be situated about 62 miles (100 kilometers) apart" – making the whole thing only slightly smaller than Great Britain. On the other hand, the NEPTUNE Project should be thought of as a terrestrial analog for other, more far-flung, research stations: according to John Delaney, for instance, a similar set-up could be used to explore the oceans of Europa (about which more can be found here). Given some oxygen tanks, it could also be the perfect location for a new public lecture series on architectural design... (Not quite related: Open Ocean Aquaculture).
Apparently this sound (which I can only hear through headphones) is causing quite a stir in the northern districts of Auckland. The sound is so maddening, it seems, that it's inspired some residents "to take drastic action" – which, in one case, means purposefully deafening oneself with the roar of chainsaws. In fact, "for those who can hear it, the sound is the bane of their lives."  The sound also reveals where unexplained acoustic phenomena, dishonesty, and urban real estate intersect: "Some have been reticent to give away more details of their predicament for fear that reports of persistent humming could adversely affect the resale price of their homes." One of the researchers trying to locate the sound's origins "rules out geological factors. 'It's more likely to be things like pipes under the ground – you know, gas pipes, sewerage pipes, factories in the distance.'" CIA installations, perhaps. "This is not the first incidence of humming in New Zealand," we're told. Oh, no. "In 2005, New Zealand author Rachel McAlpine wrote a book called The Humming... largely inspired by the author's own experiences in the seaside town of Puponga on the northwest tip of New Zealand's south island which was itself at the centre of a humming mystery some years back." That man was later arrested. In McAlpine's novel we read how "life is becoming increasingly frustrating for [a character named] Ivan because he is plagued by an underground humming that he tries to disguise with an increasingly bizarre array of devices." If it were my story to re-tell, however, Ivan would soon become so unbelievably good at manufacturing sonic camouflage that he turns into the terror of post-Blair Great Britain. (He moves to Britain). Completely silent, exploding noiseless weaponry over the city of Birmingham, Ivan's Joseph Conrad-inspired, acoustically avant-garde ransom demands are met not with payment stashed inside a pre-arranged safety deposit box – but by a visit from a certain, rather well-known, secret agent of the crown... Unfortunately, James Bond is almost immediately captured – having been dumbfounded by a house full of mirrored rooms, someone else's mobile phone, and a weird echo, coming as if from behind him, that induces a state of cognitive paralysis. Bond is then subjected to a series of unbearable noise-tortures, leading some in the audience to laugh and others to accuse the film of being an unacknowledged remake of The Ipcress File. But, once the enemy is brought back on screen, transformed by his life of sonic dissimulation, he addresses Bond through a grotesque series of hand-held voice-cancellation machines – and we see that something altogether more terrifying has been planned... Of course, it has long been known that if you "listen carefully... you can hear the Earth singing quietly to itself." They live underground. They are everywhere but seem to come from nowhere. They barely exist, but never leave. If sounds have shadows, they are the shadows of a sound. Researchers call them the background free oscillations of the Earth. These "background free oscillations," however, while more or less totally unrelated to the New Zealand drone, discussed above, are also unexplained. This endless terrestrial resonance could be "buildings shuddering in the wind," for instance – or it could be "the constant throb of fluctuating atmospheric pressure all over the Earth." It could even be the combined effect of all the oceans' waves crashing on all the earth's shores simultaneously. It could even – though let me pull the blinds closed as I write this – it could even be the rumble of invisible stealth bombers breaking the sound barrier out at sea... (Thanks, Marcus! Earlier: Sound Dunes, Dolby Earth, and so on).
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