The GroundBot system by Swedish firm Rotundus is a remote-controlled, all-weather polycarbonate sphere that "can trundle through snow, mud and sand as it supplies a live feed via a pair of cameras," Wired UK explains. "Its operator sees the image in 3D on a screen."
It apparently comes with knobby treads or without.
The sphere is currently "undergoing trials" with the Swedish Defense Forces for use "in airports and other locations in need of surveillance," but the system also has potential applications in urban mapping, remote terrain exploration, and even post-disaster search and rescue. While the GroundBot can only reach speeds a bit more than 6mph—which means it won't be breaking any speed records, and it certainly won't be hard to outrun—the idea that failed criminals of the future might be seen sprinting away from swarms of autonomous black spheres the size of car tires is quite extraordinary.
[Images: The GroundBot system by Rotundus on patrol].
The "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera," designed by Jonas Pfeil as part of his thesis project at the Technical University of Berlin, creates spherical panoramas after being thrown into the air.
The camera "captures an image at the highest point of flight—when it is hardly moving." It "takes full spherical panoramas, requires no preparation and images are taken instantaneously. It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images." You can see it at work in this video:
Pfeil explains in detail:
Our camera uses 36 fixed-focus 2 megapixel mobile phone camera modules. The camera modules are mounted in a robust, 3D-printed, ball-shaped enclosure that is padded with foam and handles just like a ball. Our camera contains an accelerometer which we use to measure launch acceleration. Integration lets us predict rise time to the highest point, where we trigger the exposure. After catching the ball camera, pictures are downloaded in seconds using USB and automatically shown in our spherical panoramic viewer. This lets users interactively explore a full representation of the captured environment.
It's easy enough to imagine such a thing being mass-produced and taken up by the Lomo crowd; but it seems equally likely that such a technology could be put to use aiding military operations in urbanized terrain, with otherwise disoriented squad leaders tossing "robust" optical grenades up above dividing walls and blocked streets to see what lies beyond.
Either way, a throwable camera strong enough to withstand bad weather and strong bounces—and able to store hundreds of images—sounds like an amazing way to start documenting the urban landscape. In fact, the very idea that a "photograph" would thus correspond to a spherical sampling of all the objects and events in a given area adds an intriguing spatial dimension to the act of creating images. It's a kind of reverse-firework: rather than release light into the sky, it steals traces of the light it finds there.
In just a few hours here at Studio-X NYC—an off-campus event space and urban futures think tank run by Columbia's GSAPP—we'll be hosting a live interview with Ilona Gaynor. Gaynor is a London-based concept artist, filmmaker, and multimedia designer, as well as the most recent recipient of the Ridley Scott Associates award, where she currently serves as artist-in-residence.
As Gaynor explains it, her work "largely consists of artificially constructed spaces, systems and atmospheres navigated through fictional scenarios," her intention being "to intensify, fantasize and aestheticize the darker, invisible reaches of political, economical and technological progress. Grounded in rigorous research, consultation and collaboration," she continues, "my aim is to reveal these worlds by exploring the imaginary limits within them both as critique and speculative pleasure."
Her most recent short film, Everything Ends In Chaos, embedded at the start of this post, presents "a mixed-media collection of objects, narrative texts and films that reveal the intricate trajectories of an artificially designed and reverse engineered Black Swan event." A Black Swan, in Gaynor's telling of it, based on the economic work of NassimNicholas Taleb, is the idea that humans "are collectively and individually blind to uncertainty, and therefore often unaware of the impact that singular events can have on [their] lives: economically, historically and scientifically, until after their occurrence." Her film is thus an attempt to "reverse-engineer" such an event, piecing together chaos from order; the film's backstory, which is unfortunately quite hard to detect from the imagery alone, involves an elaborate kidnapping plot, stolen jewels force-fed to doves (which then escape from their cage and fly away), and an actuarial committee in charge of insuring against this event.
In another work, nature—that is, non-human lifeforms, especially plants—has become so expensive and, thus, so out of reach for everyday workers—in Gaynor's future, for example, a single Ficus tree costs £450,000—that indulging in any interaction with the natural world becomes an experience of "unapologetic decadence." That film, 120 Seconds of Future, is embedded below:
Gaynor kicks things off at 7pm tonight—Wednesday, 12 October—to be followed by an open Q&A. We'll be at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610. Here's a map.
Unfortunately, I have to ask that you RSVP, if possible, to studioxnyc at gmail dot com—but I hope to see some of you there!
[Image: The Blue Angels create their own cloud systems over the San Francisco Bay; view larger].
My week in San Francisco, now at an end, coincided with Fleet Week—and, thus, the arrival of the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy's "Flight Demonstration Squad." While the often overwhelming noise of the Blue Angels—rattling whole buildings at a time and setting off car alarms—is extremely polarizing, both acoustically and politically, I continued to have incredibly interesting, albeit very brief, conversations about them, extending beyond mere love or hate.
1)Performance Physics
After a friend of mine drove into town for a meeting, he described to me how the individual planes—high-speed military jets flying often disconcertingly low over the city in geometrically complex configurations—would disappear behind one of San Francisco's many hills... only to pop out behind a different hill altogether, visibly out of synch with the Doppler'd roar of its passage (which seemed to echo hilltop to hilltop across the Bay).
But then another identical jet—or was it the same?—would appear behind a different hill, or it would come circling up from another direction entirely, and it began to feel, my friend explained, as if he had inadvertently driven into the middle of a kind of quantum event, with the same—or was it?—airplane appearing and disappearing, over and over again, reappearing and swooping back from different angles, all the while mis-timed with its own acoustic side-effects.
It was, we might say, not performance art but performance physics: an immersive, urban-scale demonstration of quantum dislocation, one object—or multiple?—and multiple objects—or just one?—constantly out of self-synch in a single setting. It was not the military-industry complex but airborne physics: the skies of San Francisco temporarily modeling an inter-dimensional event.
2)Sky Forensics
During the two-day "blogging workshop" that I led this past weekend at the San Francisco Art Institute, one of the participants—artist Alex Shepard—noted that the passage of the Blue Angels had been setting off car alarms all over the city. But, he added, the locations of the car alarms always—of course—coincided with the physical passage of the airplanes, following around right behind them; so, he suggested, you could actually reconstruct the aerial trajectories of the planes through entirely indirect means, using nothing but AAA data and SFPD noise complaints.
These street-level data, collated with enough ambition and accuracy, could thus be seen as a kind of fossil record for the Blue Angels' weekend performance: a distributed motion-capture device parked throughout the peninsular city. The planes, in other words, left more traces than just artificial clouds: they mapped their own passage through car alarms.
In twenty years' time, then, forensic historians could reconstruct the skies of Fleet Week 2011 using nothing but data from parked cars.
3)Literary Climatology
Because we met up for a blogging workshop, the students at the SFAI and I began to talk about other media for literary self-expression—beyond paper and digital screens—and we briefly got onto the subject of skywriting. A Geico ad had been spotted earlier in the day, one of them pointed out, drifting from the back of a skywriting plane, as if in competition with the more abstract cloud shapes produced by the Blue Angels (who, seemingly seduced by San Francisco, took to drawing hearts in the sky).
That led us to the subject of J.G. Ballard's short story, "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," in which a small Pacific island—if I remember the story correctly—serves as the setting of a peculiar cultural contest: the advanced cultivation of artificial clouds, using kites and small by-planes.
From there, we got onto the premise of Roberto Bolaño's novella Distant Star. There, Bolaño tells the story of Carlos Wieder, a poet who—to quote the Daily Telegraph, as I am ironically on board an airplane right now, flying over central Wyoming, and thus do not have access to my copy of the book—"wears the uniform of the Chilean air force and pilots an old Messerschmitt—with which he writes stirring poetic phrases in the sky. The generals and their wives think these aerial stunts are wonderfully entertaining, but Wieder's professed ambition is to inaugurate a new, populist poetry of "barbarism", which abandons old literatures and flies into the glorious future."
The idea of blogging in the sky through the medium of artificial weather—chemically produced, aerodynamic clouds draping the city in a haze of literary climatology—thus presented at least one more alternative way of looking at the highly polarizing urban presence of the Blue Angels.
[Image: The weird artificial geology of "soil equivalent" landfill foam; image courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency].
On the way over to the west coast last week, I read Universal Foam: Exploring the Science of Nature's Most Mysterious Substance by Sidney Perkowitz. Amongst references to "applied foam science," "computational foam" studies, and even a "power-producing sonoluminescent foam" that might someday be used to generate electricity for the national grid, there were two ideas for future infrastructure that seem worth repeating here.
1)Foam Roads
While discussing the buffering quality foam can offer as protection against explosions, Perkowitz points out the logical next step in the neutralization of land mines: he writes, roughly 11 years ago, that "a quick-hardening rigid polyurethane foam is being tested at Sandia"—already manufacturers of a successful "decontamination foam"—"for use in nullifying mines on land or in water by buffering soldiers and equipment against their explosive force, or to lay down a safe ribbon for vehicles to travel."
This "safe ribbon" is, of course, a road—a road made entirely of foam, laid down over active land mines so as to protect vehicles against detonation from below. A whole new class of transportation infrastructure arises: unexplodable foam roads fanning out across military landscapes; instant roads-in-a-can, like shaving cream, that you spray over dangerous terrain; even foam bridges spanning rivers and caves.
Whether or not we'll see roads-in-a-can coming soon to a Home Depot or city works department near you, however, I'd be shocked not to see foam-road weapons in a computer game shortly—foamed infrastructure brought to you in a flash as new roads and bridges bubble out and harden over otherwise inaccessible terrain. Post-geologic weaponized foam activities.
2)Foam Geotechnics
Later in the book, Perkowitz refers to "the possibility that foam could extinguish the twenty-year old Percy Coal Mine fire in Pennsylvania," as well as to "the use of an acidic foam to destroy asbestos installed in buildings by simply spraying it on." In both cases, you would fill a closed space with foam, which would thus go to work extinguishing underground fires or chemically dissolving asbestos.
However, this segues directly into a brief exploration of the geotechnical implications of quick-hardening foam. Chemist Paul Kittle, Perkowitz explains, "worked out a way to cover garbage landfills with foam" back in the 1980s. Quoting at length:
A significant portion of a landfill is occupied by plain dirt, which according to EPA guidelines must be piled six inches deep every night to cover that day's trash. Kittle came up with an environmentally benign shaving cream-like foam that would adhere even to steep slopes and would not blow away. The foam stopped rats and bugs, and prevented odors from rising. But unlike dirt, it dissipated after thirty-six hours, no longer taking up room when it was no longer needed under newer trash. For this reason, says Kittle, using his foam could save up to 15 percent of landfill space.
Geotechnical foams are now used in places like the Puente Hills landfill in Los Angeles, using equipment manufactured by Rusmar Foam; Rusmar offers foams of various durations, from 12 hours to 180 days, and with scents such as Vanilla and Wintergreen. Best of all, their product is called "Soil Equivalent Foam"—it is an earth-surrogate, a replicant geology.
But this leaves Perkowitz with what he calls "an image to relish": Perkowitz closes that section of his book imagining "the huge track vehicle Kittle designed, patiently spreading liquid foam to cover acres of garbage made partly of indestructible foamed plastic peanuts, coffee cups, and McDonald's clamshells." Inside a plastic earth, in other words, we simply find more plastics, in an artificial geology sealed with geotechnical foam. Literally what on earth might future geologists think?
A very large boulder is on its way to Los Angeles, we read in the New York Times this morning: a 340-ton rock on a journey moving "through the heart of one of the most congested urban centers in the country: nine nights at six miles an hour, through 120 miles of roads, highways, bridges, overpasses, overhead wires, alarmingly low-hanging traffic lights and sharp turns."
The rock is going there for an installation by artist Michael Heizer, called "Levitated Mass," and it was "dynamited out of a hillside" 60 miles from Los Angeles.
[Image: The rock in question; photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the The New York Times].
"The effort, nearly five years in the planning (though Mr. Heizer has been making sketches of it as far back as the late 1960s), feels nothing short of a military movement: an incursion through a bewildering thicket of state, city and county regulations and a region with a notoriously difficult street grid," Adam Nagourney writes in the New York Times.
In fact, the rock's specific route never relied on one path through that "bewildering thicket," but has been constantly updated and changed; as Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Heizer's rock will be displayed, points out, "the State of California is always reviewing the state of its bridges and roads. So a route plan that would have worked a couple of days ago doesn’t work today."
This has the effect of doubling the distance covered: "Door to door," Nagourney writes, "the distance is 60 miles, though the actual drive is going to be closer to 120 miles, as engineers plot a route that can accommodate the huge size of what is known as the Prime Mover, and one that steers clear of low bridges and wires. Any route must have stopover spots to park the rock as it waits for night."
The museum's $10 million boulder-displacement project has, of course, faced some public criticism—but Govan has a response for that: "we are putting more people to work here in L.A. than Obama," he quips. This includes "teams of workers... deployed to lift telephone and power lines, swing traffic lights to the side and lay down steel plates on suspect patches of roads or bridges."
I remember once reading once about the construction of the Pompidou Center in Paris, which required an elaborate ballet of shutting down whole streets and intersections in the middle of the night, when traffic would already be low, to truck massive girders and beams in past the mansard roofs and streetside cafes of a sleeping city. The building was first a distributed network of large, chaperoned objects, taking shape load by load, before it briefly served as a gleaming sign of the architectural future.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, thieves have dismantled and stolen an entire steel bridge near Pittsburgh. "Pennsylvania State Police are looking for a steel bridge worth an estimated $100,000 that was dismantled and taken from a rural area in Lawrence County," we read. "Police said they believe a torch was used to cut apart the bridge, which measured 50 feet by 20 feet, near Covert's Crossing in North Beaver Township."
If you see the bridge—or its parts—moving slowly down a remote Appalachian road somewhere, I'm sure the police would appreciate a heads up.
For his thesis project at the University of Toronto, Clint Langevin, in collaboration with Amy Norris, proposed "repurposing abandoned mines as renewable energy infrastructure in the U.S."
[Image: Inside the Picher, Oklahoma, supergrid, by Clint Langevin and Amy Norris].
The specific site for their project is the Tar Creek Lead and Zinc Mine in Picher, Oklahoma, which long-term BLDGBLOG readers might remember as the town at risk from cave-ins. As the Washington Post reported in 2007, "Trucks traveling along the highway are diverted around Picher for fear that the hollowed-out mines under the town would cause the streets to collapse under the weight of big rigs." The unlucky town was then gutted by a tornado in 2008.
Langevin's and Norris's work highlights the area's surreal, almost Cappadocian landscape: "Dozens of waste rock piles, some up to 13-storeys high," they write, "and contaminated ground and surface water are the legacy of mining operations in the area, which produced a significant portion of the lead used in the World Wars."
The architects specifically propose "a structure that raises the solar energy infrastructure off the ground [and] creates the opportunity to host other activities on the site, as well as to remediate the polluted ground and waterways. The concrete structure, pre-fabricated using waste rock material from the site, is assembled in a modular fashion from a kit of parts that accommodates a variety of programs."
[Image: The "kit of parts"].
"Importantly," the architects add, "the hollow structure also acts as a conduit to carry water, energy, waste—all the infrastructure for human habitation—to all inhabited areas of the site."
The result is a three-tiered plan: the topmost layer is devoted to solar energy development and production: testing the latest solar technology and producing a surplus of energy for the site and its surroundings. This layer is also the starting point for water management on the site. Rainwater is collected as needed and transported through the structure to one of several treatment plants around the radial plan. The middle layer is the place of dwelling and exploration of the site. As the need for space grows, beams are added to create this inhabited layer: the beams act as a pedestrian and cycling circulation system, but also the infrastructure for dwelling and automated transit. Finally, the ground layer becomes a laboratory for bioremediation of the ground and water systems. Passive treatment of both the waste water from the site and of the acid mine drainage is coupled with a connected system of boardwalks to allow inhabitants and visitors to experience both the industrial inheritance of the site and the renewed hope for its future.
It's a bit of a Swiss Army knife—in the sense that it tries to solve everything and have a solution for every possible challenge—with the effect that the architects seem to under-emphasize the titanic supergrid that clearly defines the overall proposal. It's as if the proposal is so large—more landform building than architectural undertaking—that even the architects lose sight of it, focusing instead on individual systems in their description.
[Images: A wanderer above the sea of white cubes gazes at the Picher supergrid].
But inside this continuous and monumental space frame, whole communities could live—the "infrastructure for dwelling" and "pedestrian and cycling circulation system"—surrounded by a toxic geography for which the grid itself serves as both sublime filter and possible remedy.
[Images: More views inside the supergrid; second image is simply a detail from the first (view larger)].
The model for the project is pretty great, and I would love to see it in person: a cavernous grid envelopes the site's artificial topography, wrapping tailings piles and hills of waste rock, whilst treading lightly on ground too thin to hold the weight of architecture.
[Image: Singapore expands beneath the Pacific Ocean; via the BBC].
Singapore has embarked upon the excavation of an underground oil reserve, expanding the city's industrial port beneath the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It is "no ordinary construction site," the BBC tells us, but an elaborate project of engineering and infrastructure currently underway "several hundred feet underground, below the seabed in Singapore."
There, workers are "laboring around the clock to carve out an enormous network of caverns that will eventually store vast amounts of oil."
[Images: Singapore expands beneath the Pacific Ocean; via the BBC].
More specifically, "Five oil storage caverns are being dug out under the seabed of Banyan Basin, off Jurong island, a series of mostly-reclaimed islands that house most of Singapore's petrochemical industry."
Artificial caverns built offshore from manmade islands?
The terrestrial mechanics of Singapore's existence are increasingly interesting, if ecologically problematic. As Pruned's recent look at the city's sand-importation economy shows, the island-nation exists through a near-ceaseless act of geological accumulation, piecing itself together and expanding from the inside out using deposits of earth taken from neighboring countries.
Singapore, Pruned writes, "has been reclaiming land from the sea since the mid-1960s, expanding its total land area by nearly 25% as a result. And it's still growing. With no hinterlands to supply it with natural resources, however, it has to import sand, the primary landfill material. But exactly where, the Singaporean government does not disclose. Its supply lines are not public information."
Earlier this year, we looked at the idea of forensic geology, whereby even a single piece of sand can be tracked back to its terrestrial origins. As that link explains, the source of electronics-grade silicon is often deliberately occluded from public documents, treated as an industrial trade secret. Here, though, it is not microchips but internationally recognized political territory that is being mined, traded, and assembled—a black economy without audit or receipts.
Singapore's off-the-books experiment in sovereign expansion—not through military conquest but through intelligent geotextiles, Herculean dredging projects, and, of course, new undersea caverns—is perhaps a kind of limit-case in how nation-states not only utilize natural resources but literally build themselves from the ground up (and down) as political acts of landscape architecture.
[Image: Poster for "The Queen of Chinatown" by Joseph Jarrow, courtesy of the Library of Congress].
Someone should write a short history of the trapdoor as spatial plot device in Broadway plays, literary fiction, Hollywood thrillers, and even dreams, CIA plots, Dungeons & Dragons modules, and more. How does the trapdoor, as an unexpected space of strategic perforation and architectural connection, serve both to move a plot forward and to give spatial form to characterization?
The "Queen of Chinatown" poster seen above, for instance, with its sprung floor collapsing beneath the weight of a hapless sailor, seems to promise an entire urban district—"Chinatown" as an Orientalist fantasy of inscrutable passageways and other devious spatial practices—illicitly Swiss-cheesed with unexpected wormholes. Chutes, pits, wells, and shafts are perhaps distributed throughout the neighborhood, we're led to imagine, giving the erstwhile "Queen" her strategic mastery of the area. Chinatown becomes a hive of "mysterious Chinese tunnels," a porous space guarded not through high fortress walls or even by watchmen or CCTV, but through a camouflaged network of surprise openings, like architectural sinkholes, that no one can predict and of which only one person knows the true extent.
The above poster, meanwhile, seems almost like an alternate-history version of Christopher Nolan's recent heist film, Inception: there are opium addicts slumbering in a warren of stacked bunkbeds in an off-the-books Chinatown dream academy, and there is a man—an anonymous investigative agent of the state—crashing through the floor into this world of broadly Asiatic decor. A multi-layered hive of architectural space seen sliced through in section, where trapdoors lead to further trapdoors. Inception as an 1890s heist caper, serialized on the popular stage.
In any case, a spatial history of trapdoors—in film, literature, myth, dreams, and theater—would make an amazing pamphlet or book, I think, and I would love to see such a thing someday, perhaps part of a larger series of pamphlets looking at other minor architectural typologies—like log flumes and National Park trail structures and hay mazes.
[Image: "Then let it be the kiss of death!" Courtesy of the Library of Congress].
The two posters reproduced here, both available through the Library of Congress, are at least one place to start.
The book primarily documents the "Altered Landscape" photography collection at the Nevada Museum of Art. Its images "show the phase of natural history that is sometimes called the anthropocene, when human alterations of the environment have begun to surpass natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanoes," in the words of art historian W.J.T. Mitchell. As Mitchell adds, these images are more complex than simple calls for environmental action: they paradoxically include "what I can only describe as the aesthetics of sublime melancholy that cannot avoid celebrating, even as it criticizes, the gargantuan scars and inscriptions that the human species is carving into the planet."
[Image: "Howl" (2007) by Amy Stein; from The Altered Landscape edited by Ann M. Wolfe].
Works by Terry Evans, David Maisel, Richard Misrach, Amy Stein, Edward Burtynsky, Michael Wolf, Kim Stringfellow, Emmet Gowin, Michael Light, Sharon Stewart, Toshio Shibata, Todd Hido, and dozens more fill the book, depicting California suburbs and deep desert weapons-testing facilities, oil pipelines, hydroelectric dams, and quarries; there are clearcut forests and solar plants, Arctic radar fields and National Park parking lots.
In "Howl" by Amy Stein, seen above, a wolf lost in the glare of light pollution breaks the silence of an abstract landscape, turning to the artificial astronomy of the municipal grid—its surrogate moons and constellations of streetlamps—to reorient itself in the snow. However, it's worth pointing out that the wolf is, in fact, stuffed: Stein's work simultaneously stages and documents what she calls "modern dioramas of our new natural history."
[Image: "Coolidge Dam, San Carlos, AZ" (1997) by Toshio Shibata; from The Altered Landscape edited by Ann M. Wolfe].
Short essays by the book's editor Ann M. Wolfe, Nevada Museum of Art director David B. Walker, W.J.T. Mitchell (as it happens, my former thesis advisor), writer/curator Lucy Lippard, and myself round out the book.
For a variety of reasons, I was recently looking at a May 2011 report from the Air Force Research Laboratory on "Robotics: Research and Development."
[Image: From an Air Force Research Laboratory presentation on "Robotics: Research and Development"].
There—amidst plans for unmanned robotic ground convoys and autonomous perimeter defense systems for future bases and cities, not to mention fleets of robotic bulldozers field-tested for use in mine-clearance operations—there was one slide about something called "counter tunnel robotics."
Being obsessed with all things underground, this immediately caught my eye—especially as this is a program whose goal is to "develop an unmanned system with the capability to access, traverse, navigate, map, survey, and disrupt operations in rough subterranean environments ." A "miniature mapping payload" is under development, one that will allow for accurate cartographic surveys of complex underground spaces; but, because current methods "will not work in the more challenging (non-planar) tunnel environments," the Air Force explains, the new focus for R&D "will be on developing 3D mapping techniques using 3D sensors."
The [Counter Tunnel Robotics] system is an innovative all-terrain mobility platform capable of accessing tunnel systems through a small (8 inch) borehole and traversing adverse tunnel terrain including vertical obstacles up to 2ft in height and chasms up to 2ft in length. The system’s function is to provide a platform capable of carrying a small sensor package while navigating and overcoming terrain obstacles inside the tunnel. Counter tunnel technologies are needed to support intelligence gathering and safety of troops and personnel in unmapped and unknown tunnel environments. The system is the initial step in achieving a fully autonomous counter tunnel system.
A few things worth pointing out here include the mind-boggling image of "a fully autonomous counter tunnel system" operating on its own somewhere inside the earth's surface, like something out of a Jonathan Lethem novel, surely fueling the imaginations of scifi screenplay writers the world over—a planet infested with artificially intelligent tunneling machines. But it is also worth noting that these systems will very likely not be confined to use on—or in—the earth. In fact, autonomous tunnel-exploration robots will find a very hearty market for themselves exploring caves on the moon, on Mars, on asteroids, and perhaps elsewhere, in a fairly clear-cut example of military research finding a productive home for itself in other contexts.
However, I also want to mention how fascinating it is to see that the Air Force Research Laboratory is involved in this, as it actually penetrates the surface of the earth and is very much a project of the ground. It is a landscape project. But the implication here is that these autonomous spelunking units are perhaps seen as a new type of ordnance—that is, they are intelligent bombs that don't explode so much as explore. They are artillery and surveillance rolled into one. Imagine a bomb that doesn't destroy a building: instead, it drops into that building and proceeds to map every room and hallway.
But, much more interestingly, there is perhaps also an indication here that a conceptual revolution is underway within the Air Force, where the earth itself—geological space—is seen as merely a thicker version of the sky. That is, the ground is now seen by Air Force strategists as an abstract, three-dimensional space through which machines can operate, like planes in the sky, navigating past "terrain obstacles" like so much turbulence. In a sense, the inside of the earth becomes ontologically—and, certainly, technically—identical to the atmosphere: it is an undifferentiated space that can be traversed in all directions by the appropriate machinery.
Flying and tunneling thus become elided, revealed as one and the same activity; and the Air Force is understandably now in the business of the underground.
[Image: "A U.S. Air Force F-22A Raptor Stealth Fighter Jet Executes A Maneuver Through A Cloud Of Vapor"—that is, it tunnels through the sky—"At The 42nd Naval Base Ventura County Air Show, April 1, 2007, Point Mugu, State of California, USA"; photo by Technical Sgt. Alex Koenig, United States Air Force; Courtesy of Defense Visual Information and the United States Department of Defense].
That, of course, or it was simply an issue of the wrong office receiving research funds for this, and, next fiscal quarter, the Army dutifully takes over...
I'm quite late hearing this for the first time, but I was thrilled to discover composer Pierre Sauvageot's Harmonic Fields project, a participatory landscape of wind-activated musical instruments temporarily installed on the beach near Birkrigg Common, Cumbria, England. The haphazard plinks, drum rolls, whistles and drones is often mesmerizingly beautiful, as the following video makes clear. It's a kind of weather plug-in, constructed as a sequence of very different movements in space.
It was intended as an actual sound trail—"a symphonic march for 1,000 aeolian instruments and moving audience," in the composer's words, quoted by the Guardian, and "it's important that it is not just a circuit of weird noises," he quickly adds. "The experience develops through individual movements."
From the Guardian:
You are introduced to the quarter-mile trail with a prelude for 300 Balinese wind chimes, followed by an adagio slalom of tuned bamboo pipes, which gives way to a reflective passage for suspended cellos and deckchairs and a pentatonic interlude of turbine-driven glockenspiels. It concludes, like a proper symphony, with a coda drawing together all the elements in a climax of either frenzied dissonance or a soft, extended diminuendo, depending on the weather conditions.
There is a hint that this might come to New York City, which would be a dream for at least this new east coast resident; and, even better, Sauvageot is described as a "true meteorological connoisseur," with an obsessive eye on wind systems and local weather around the planet, always looking for a new place to install his work. "The dry, warm sirocco of north Africa; the crisp, chilled chinook in the Rocky Mountains—I'd love to hear how they might sound," he tells the Guardian.
Personally, if Harmonic Fields does come to New York, I'd love to see it installed on or near my favorite buildings in the city, which are the subway and tunnel ventilation structures visible on the watery fringes of the archipelago—
—and sometimes in the heart of the city. After all, there are also weather systems artificially generated inside the earth by construction projects and large-scale pieces of urban infrastructure, whole subterranean climatologies of moving air that would not otherwise exist without the implanting hand of architecture, as if surgically grafted there. Atmospheric cut-and-cover. A weather reserve beneath the sidewalk.
In any case, the idea that a region's climate—its seasonal weather systems and thermal particularities—might become something more than mere background through a simple act of musicalization—that you could install Sauvageot orchestras in places all over the world to turn storms into symphonies—is amazingly suggestive for future design projects. From low-pressure systems in central Russia to the Santa Ana winds of suburban Los Angeles, architecture becomes a musical generator, an acoustic ornament activated by the sky.
The book is a sustained look at "the evolving relationship between architecture and landscape," with a specific focus on geomorphic megastructures—that is, buildings that look like mountains and other earth forms—vegetative ornament, including green roofs, and complex interpenetrations between architecture and the surface of the earth (semi-subterranean structures, structures penetrated by bedrock, and so forth).
—and you'll learn much more about the publication at tonight's book launch. There, you'll hear from McQuade and Allen themselves, but also from Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Lucia Allais, Eric Sanderson, and Nina Katchadourian.
I'm excited to be participating in this evening's event, as well, with a short, pecha kucha-style presentation, looking at everything from constructed hills in Rome to artificial glaciers, and from the particularly vertiginous paranoia of a manmade earth to Celtic myths of the Hollow Hills. The quasi-mystical appeal of ground-penetrating radar, muon detectors in the rain forest, and methane-ventilation technology used in landfill construction will all make brief appearances.
Things kick off at 6pm; here is a map. Hope to see some of you there!
The last few weeks have been a logistical nightmare, having found that the new apartment we'd been told we could move into by August 22 was, in fact, only ready a few days ago, which means—among other things—that instead of settling in here in New York, getting Studio-X NYC up and running again, and maintaining BLDGBLOG, I've been lost in a labyrinth of wastefully overpriced hotel rooms, rental cars, long drives back and forth between NY and the Philadelphia suburbs, and endless personal favors asked of my family there; and, even now that we are surrounded by boxes again in our own place, a month late, and things are theoretically back to normal, we're having absurd internet installation problems. So I'm beginning to feel that I'm cursed. Either way, expect intermittent posting—at best—over the next week or two here as things continue their glacially slow process of getting back on track.
I'm excited to invite everyone to another evening at Studio-X NYC, with photographer SimonNorfolk and journalist NoahShachtman, who will participate in two back-to-back live interviews discussing new spaces and technologies of conflict in the 21st century.
Tuesday's conversation will revisit many of those same themes, but it will do so in the provocative context of Norfolk's newest project, a photographic tour of Afghanistan in the footsteps of photographer John Burke:
In October 2010, Simon Norfolk began a series of new photographs in Afghanistan, which takes its cue from the work of nineteenth-century British photographer John Burke. Norfolk’s photographs reimagine or respond to Burke’s Afghan war scenes in the context of the contemporary conflict. Conceived as a collaborative project with Burke across time, this new body of work is presented alongside Burke’s original portfolios.
We will take a look not only at the resulting photographs—a selection of which appear here—but at the often overlapping responsibilities of the photojournalist and the artist in documenting political events in conflict zones around the world.
As you can see in the photos reproduced here, Norfolk has an eye for complex stratigraphy: where US and UK basecamps overlap with Afghan townscapes, which in turn visually—and politically—repeat earlier scenes from a different era of misbegotten imperial adventures in Central Asia.
It is all simply "a cycle of imperial history," Norfolk suggests, one in which a "lack of historical perspective on the part of the West allows them to blunder back for the fourth time thinking that you can turn Afghans into western liberal democrats and feminists by bombing them." Norfolk doesn't mince words: "the prosecution of the war makes me furious," he explains in a long conversation hosted on his website.
Noah Shachtman's reputation as a journalist and editor has been firmly solidified over nearly a decade. Beginning with DefenseTech, a site Shachtman founded in 2003, and continuing with the current reign of Wired's Danger Room, Shachtman has been prolific, engaged, and highly active in helping to set the agenda for national defense coverage in the post-9/11 world.
We'll be asking Shachtman about everything from the limits of the battlefield—where war chaotically begins and unclearly ends—to new technologies of surveillance, and from the strategic requirements of a journalist covering today's sites of conflict to the possible urban futures Shachtman might detect in current military headlines.
I'm genuinely looking forward to this, and hope to see many of you there. The format will be as follows. From 6:30pm to shortly after 7pm, we will be engaging with Simon Norfolk in a live interview about his work; then, till roughly 7:40pm, we will be interviewing Noah Shachtman. These will be stand-alone interviews, conducted back-to-back.
The final stretch of the night, from 7:45 to 8:30pm or so, will be an open conversation with both Norfolk and Shachtman, featuring questions from anyone who might have them. This will allow us to discuss similarities and differences between their work, and to tease out other themes that might have been passed over in the individual interviews.
Unfortunately, I have to ask that you RSVP to studioxnyc [at] gmail [dot] com if you plan to attend. Otherwise, the event is free and open to the public.
You will find us at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, in Manhattan. Here is a map.
As Norfolk says in the BLDGBLOG interview, and which perhaps serves as a useful conceptual umbrella for the entire forthcoming evening:
All of the work that I’ve been doing over the last five years is about warfare and the way war makes the world we live in. War shapes and designs our society. The landscapes that I look at are created by warfare and conflict. This is particularly true in Europe. I went to the city of Cologne, for instance, and the city of Cologne was built by Charlemagne—but Cologne has the shape that it does today because of the abilities and non-abilities of a Lancaster Bomber. It comes from what a Lancaster can do and what a Lancaster can't do. What it cannot do is fly deep into Germany in the middle of the day and pinpoint-bomb a ball bearing factory. What it can do is fly to places that are quite near to England, that are five miles across, on a bend in the river, under moonlight, and then hit them with large amounts of H.E.. And if you do that, you end up with a city that looks like Cologne—the way the city's shaped.
So I started off in Afghanistan photographing literal battlefields—but I'm trying to stretch that idea of what a battlefield is. Because all the interesting money now—the new money, the exciting stuff—is about entirely new realms of warfare: inside cyberspace, inside parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Eavesdropping, intelligence, satellite warfare, imaging—this is where all the exciting stuff is going to happen in twenty years' time. So I wanted to stretch that idea of what a battleground could be. What is a landscape—a surface, an environment, a space—created by warfare?
I hope to see you at 6:30pm on Tuesday, September 13th.
BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.
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