yr studio is a city

shooting a film is an anal thing when it comes to privacy and exclusion from the real world. we’d rather keep the reel of the movie separated from the real of the world we are making a film about. this physical separation results in autonomous enclaves within the city, where you can only get in with a pass and an appropiate id.

taking the movie studio out of its exclusive surroundings and bringing it into the real world could generate a whole new way of looking at both film and the city. using the city not only as a visual element but also as a programmatic part of the process of filmmaking, thereby redefining the art of filming of and living in the city.

what better place to experiment with new concepts of visual urbanism than china? the cities of china are being built, destroyed and rebuilt at a pace only cinema could understand. the results are disputable, but what is certain is that cities like beijing or shanghai are undergoing a transformation that leaves their old urban fabric torn and indistinghuisable.

yr studio is a city looks both at contemporary china as well as at old, pre-capitalist china. the intricate structure of the hutongs, the old housing neighbourhoods, are adapted for modern times. their visually entangling physique is reconstructed, not only graphically, but also programmatically.

the city becomes a place where filming is no longer a separate, disjoint operation but something that will be as common as walking or eating your dog.

grand entry in the grove

even in a car-based city as los angeles there are still some places people use their feet to go around. the venice beach boardwalk, parts of downtown and the farmers' markets are among those. another place designed for walking is the grove l.a. but even here you are forcefully reminded you are in la, the capital of car country.

the grove is basically a shopping mall urban development as there are so many of in the united states and canada (and more and more in old europe). it has a nice, old imported look on its facades so people don't feel at home; remember, for a lot of americans going to one of those big-ass shopping centers, like the west edmonton mall or the mall of the americas, is like going to paris or london for a lot of europeans. it's a special thing to do, so you better have a good time when there.

and to be honest, they did give it a try. you have people walking around, a wide array of shops, restaurants and a very, very, very big movie theater. there is even a little tram driving around on a track. i would almost buy it as being the real, unfabricated world, if it wasn't for the way you enter the area: through a parking garage.

there is no apparent pedestrian entrance, the streets inside the complex run into dead walls and as you can see, there is no real designing in the parking garage structure (although the apparently endless repetition of beams and columns could propably inspire some latter-day structuralists...). it is this transition from parking to walking that makes the grove so undeniably hollywood-ian. everything is fake, just a facade. and just like the moment you walk out of a movie theatre and realize that it was all fake, the moment you leave the luscious and friendly environment of the grove, you realize you are in la: the car is waiting.

add:
a friend told me an interesting thing about universal's city walk. since we're in la, everything you see and every image is somewhat from another place from around the world. hollywood likes to mimick the planet. but in citywalk, la actually mimicks itself. you have a piece of downtown, venice, hollywood and even compton. but most of all, a lot of universal.

since i have forgotten to bring my camera there (twice already; bad architect!), the photos here are not my own. photo 1 is by binaryla, photo 2 is by supermod. you don't know it, but thanks. next time i'll bring my own camera.

There is but one window left

If the 1960s brought the frontiers of the state from its political borders to the interior of our cities, then john carpenters’ 1996 film ‘Escape from LA’ presented us with a new kind of frontier: the city as a state, devoid from all sense of justice, common behaviour and moral laws. Besides a 100-minute orgy of violence, explosions and other Hollywood-generated fireworks, the movie offered viewers an interesting concept of control and interface in a not too distant future.

The ‘Big One’ has seperated Los Angeles from the rest of the United States and gave the fictional, fascistoid government the opportunity to create a new prison state on the LA island. Criminals are shipped in, much like the United Kingdom used Australia as a prison island in the 1800s. The main protagonists in the film are equipped with tracking devices that precisely tell the command center on the other side of the San Fernando Sea where they are and where they are moving to. Human being has been reduced to being nothing more but a bleep on a computer screen. Geographical scale and position have been terminated in a reductionist matter that leaves nothing but vectors and data. No interaction or visual information is transmitted to the operators; in this world of digits, it is not necessary.

Just like the military movements of Escape from L.A. have been rid of their aggressive impact, bullets and fleshwounds in order to make the order of battle comprehensible in the headquarters of the US Army – or United States Police Force – the ways of airtraffic are greatly being reduced and schematized before their instanteneous appearance on the air traffic controller’s preferably monochromatic screens. What we perceive as ‘the control tower’ is nothing more than a cinematic, impressive farce, designed to give the airtraveller the soothing feeling of safety they so much crave for before entering those flying tubes of potential death and destruction. The ‘windows’ of the control tower control and show nothing but taxiing aircraft, excreting their passengers onto the ground planes or absorbing other ones for another act of geographic displacement.

The windows are not the action. The action is one floor below or above, in an ironically windowless room. We are not to be distracted by real windows when we are watching our screens where a dramatic pseudo-three dimensional play of vectors in space is taking place, yesterday, today, tomorrow. This disconnection from the real and physical world, imposed upon us by technology and translated to us through the screen, or third window as Virilio calls it, both gives us a farstretching power and at the same time a strange distance from real-life events.

We are entering the world of the ‘participatory and pro-active panopticon’. There are already maps of Amsterdam and Manhattan that index the locations of surveillance cameras. It is not about being seen anymore, it is about avoiding being seen. We no longer just cast our vote for a presidential election or a environmental proposition, we now also vote for American Idols, the next personal assistant of Donald Trump or who has to leave Big Brother’s House. This dangerous intrusion in real life will take a new turn when the physical borders of this country will be replaced by virtual ones. A website showing us realtime video footage of the US-Mexican border will allow everybody to play his or her own private minuteman, securing America’s borders from behind the screen.

The original Windows of the World came down on September 11, 2001. Their intent however had long before been taken over by the screen. The destruction of the World Trade Center’s restaurant was more than anything else a symbolic act. It represented the demise of the physical window as a transmitter of images and content. In this world of the omni-present panopticon all is reduced to the screen. Whether its illegal immigrants crossing the border, airplanes in the sky or guerilleros in Los Angeles, all is represented on the screen. Virilio’s analogy of the three windows has proven true. It has overdone itself. We are no longer being commanded by the first window of the door, or the second window of the hole in the wall. They are no longer necessary for a world where geography and distance have already disappeared. We can live and let live, by the act of watching Virilio’s third window alone.

inspired by subtopia.

Defying gravity

With the arrival of the internet, of low-cost cariers and of global terrorism, the concept of distance has finally disappeared. What remains is a unified plane where everything is at the same place at the same time. Together with speed, gravity is disappearing as well. When Burt Rutan managed to launch a spaceship into the outer layers of the atmosphere, he defied the more classic ruleset of governments and countries defining the boundaries of space. He overcame gravity.

If we combine these two factors of transformation, we arrive at a crossroad in space and time Paul Virilio has been fascinated by for a long time. Since gravity is no longer anything more than a constant, only keeping us from floating away from the earth’s surface, we must redefine our own relationship with gravity and its messenger, the ground’s plane.

For long and oft architecture has been a tool to characterize places and spaces, to identify them and to give them value. Those values were often solely based on the opinion of the instigator of the architecture, less than on that of the creator of the architecture, the architect. Adolf Hitler wanted to create his vision of the world, not only by conquering and oppressing almost the entire European peninsula, but also by building a capital city, Germania, bigger and bolder than ever encountered by mankind before. The grotesque collection of buildings along the two axis of the plan not only defined space, they defined distance as well. To cross the north-south axis would mean to cross more than 300 feet of boulevards, trees and gardens. To walk from the southend to the northend of this axis would mean to cover a distance of more than four miles. More than that the spaces defined the extremes of this plan, it were the distances that were really the instrument of power, the tool to make a visitor feel small and irrelevant.

Commonday society is no longer based on distance or gravity. It has become nothing more than a variable in the bigger field of vehicular vectors, of speed. Virilio’s habitable circulation eagerly anticipated this move. It negates both distance and gravity by creating a continuous plane of movement, habitation and place. There is no distance anymore, since you already find yourself in the plane of destination.

Military technology, Virilio states, has made the distinction between object and distance, between vehicle and projectile disappear. The distinction has been replaced by a uniform entity or quality, the vector. In architecture, as well as in the field of military operations, vectors need a point of origin; they simply cannot appear out of nowhere. The cruise missile still needs a launch platform to begin its devastating crusade against the enemy, as much as architecture still needs the ground plane to reach for the stars. A student in Delft once designed a house, floating in the air, only kept upright by a single line, extending from a crane located on the balcony of that same house. Architecture as its own legislator and judge.

Structures of spatial repression and segregation in an age without distance are archaic in their ideology and yet crushingly modern in their effect. Like the wall around the West Bank, designed to keep Palestine terrorists from entering Israel, does not only redefine circulation in a spatial matter, it also redefines circulation on a social level. This wall is not only a barrier to counter the speed of terrorist intrusion, it is also a barrier to slow down the development of Palestine society. Like a self fulfilling prophecy, it is creating its own reason for existence.

In a city as Los Angeles, distance has already disappeared. It has been replaced by continuous place. You don’t have to leave the city to go anywhere. Anaheim is Santa Monica is San Fernando. This disappearance of distance and unification of place has primarily been caused by the automobile. Its ability to cover a considerable amount of distance in a short time allowed the cities to expand beyond classic boundaries, imposed by the man on feet. Compare the Los Angeles basin with the ‘Randstad’ in the Netherlands, and you will find two different metropolitan areas. Whereas in Los Angeles, distance has been gone completely, in the Randstad there still is a notion of it. One still has the feeling he is covering a certain distance traveling from, say, Rotterdam to Amsterdam, most notably because of the difference in backdrops one encounters during the travel. By obliterating difference and distance in the city, one automatically loses the ‘feeling’ for a city.

Manuel Delanda once said, “difference is the fuel of evolution”. Perhaps distance is the fuel of the city.

the segregated airport

been spending a lot of time on and in airports lately. and however it may sound familiar or even outdated, i also feel that airports are more and more becoming like cities.

subject: automated walkways.

case: tokyo narita airport

narita, tokyo's major airport, is laidout in a rather classic spoke system. the different gate areas are all located on the ends of longer piers, connecting at the central arrivals hall. unlike for example atlanta, where all terminals are linear and situated parallel to each other, connected through a underground rail, tokyo narita is small enough to be walkable. still there are automated walkways. the longest one does make sense, being over 150 meters, but the smaller ones, only extending to about twenty feet, are simply put absurd. 

for one, they create horizontal barriers in an already horizontal space. many airports have the uncomfortable tendency to appear as extremely long, horizontal and monotonous. boring. automated walkways not only divide up the already segregated spaces, they also tend to cluster facilities and passengers at their beginnings (or ends). like the highway in the city, the exits are where the urban craziness appears, however at a high price.

but where the city is often able to offer a wide array of niche facilities away from the highway exits and crossings, in places where land is cheaper and more abundant, the airport has no room to offer to those often interesting businesses. we are forever condemned to the same franchises in airports. mcdonalds, starbucks and duty-free shops will cluster at the entrances of the walkways like jack-in-the-box, home depot and gas stations will.

the gentrification of the airport is not a result of programmatic reason, dependent on financial factors, but much more a result of the spatial lay-out of the circulation spaces.

written over the pacific #3

a very interesting proposal for an airport of the 21st century can be seen here.

_md417* 1 km/h drive thru airport by miklos deri

personal glorification in the aught's

just remembered being on a flight from chicago to la, when i got into talking with the lady sitting next to me. we talked a bit, laughed at each others jokes and so on, and got to the inevitable gestures of social behaviour: so what's the reason for your visit to la? (think the 'security' officer at your local airport, but than less paranoid)

i explained my sci-arc study plans, explained about delft and architecture and the whole ram-bam. next was her turn. she told me she had a documentary film production company in chicago. nothing special, going to la for movie production people is like going to the toilet for you and me. the best part however, was that it was no ordinary documentaries she made.

whenever somebody contacted her to make a documentary, it would be about somebody else.

say you are filthy rich, and think your better half/best friend/father/mother(/pet for i don't know who's sake), really deserves a nice tribute video for his/her/its birthday/graduation/first teeth/..., al you have to do is contact the nice lady's company and they do the rest. they hunt down old high school loves, interview the subject's favourite college professor or car salesman, all to turn it into a nice video, to be given to the person in question.

nice...?

personal glorification is not new. it's been around since the year zero. roman emperors liked to have their face everywhere, have their own temples erected or even name a wall after themselves. cut to the twentieth century, we had mr. hitler trying to turn berlin into one major ejaculation of personal ass-kissing, stalin tried to do it, but got destalinized after his death, and of course we have the body of chairman mao (is it one, two, three or four of them?) on tian'anmen square, with long lines of people paying their last respect, even thirty years after his passing.

and so now we have personal glorification on a slightly smaller and less lethal level. i haven't tried it, but google-ing for 'one-person shrine' or 'ass-kissing through video' and you might just find the chicago-based company.

written over the pacific #1

oh, the lady was flying to la to interview benicio del toro, who was - yes i'm not kidding - the high-school sweetheart of the person subject in the video (a google-hotshot).

and if you want to read more about people with power or money trying to glorify theirselves, try reading 'the edifice complex' by deyan sudjic.

of course i don't want to blow up this plane - i think religious violence is for retards.

short as possible summary of all the 'security' measures i had to face flying from beijing to la through tokyo.

1. check-in luggage control: have to open everything, take it out of my bag. chinese people don't care about the number of illegal dvd-copies, knock-off super-a class counterfeit bags and fake converse shoes you pack, as long as there's a seal on your bag that says 'security checked'.

2. check-in interview: 'why are you going to the states?' 'where has your baggage been?' and so on and so on.

3. passport control. back in the days, when this was just it....

4. first security check - for american flights only. friend i was traveling with had to hand in all her liquid stuff, mascara and make-up, while the old lady in front of me was allowed to take hers with her, together with her pliers and scissors. summary executions seem less random. laptop x-rayed seperately.

5. second security check, at the gate - 'please step out of the line sir' sure, whatever, not that i have any choice... they take my carry-on bag apart, metal detect me, and check my shoes. i want to meet the first person that can pack anything in the soles of a converse that is not durt picked up from the street...

add. passengers also have to fill in a customs form leaving the country. xeroxing the one you have to fill in upon entering is apparently beyond beijings grasp.

6. in tokyo: security check in the transfer area. laptop not removed from my bag, nobody asked for it.

7. after the gate, another hauling of the bag, and surprise: again no bomb in my bag!

8. standing in line for us customs for an hour, and when its my turn, the customs guys needs to take a number two because he 'takes this medicine for his stomach which makes him go number two multiple times a day'.

whatever.

written over the pacific #2

Dutch homes, American homes

what is considered wrong or even fascist in the netherlands, according to 'educated' architects and architecture students, is the hot stuff in the states. yes, i'm talking about 'new tradition', 'regional historialism' or 'modern traditionalism'. in the netherlands, it looks like this.

people love it. we dutch tried to counter the 'debilization' of home owners by filling up subdivision like ypenburg by over-designed homes, that make all the magazines but apparently still don't really work.

  

and in the states, they build it like this.

is it still our job to decide what's hot or not? or should we really be servants to the people's wishes?

read this: designing america (wall street journal, oct. 6)

urban wasteland & natural refuge - a journey through time and space

you can say what you want about Los Angeles, but one thing is true. the amount of asphalt, roads and highways do allow you to go anyplace in a reasonable amount of time. Compared to the Netherlands, where a trip from Rotterdam to Amsterdam (about 55 miles) feels like an eternity, driving around in LA feels like a short ride.

You never leave the city. driving around for 3 hours and only seeing houses, parking garages and strip malls is possible. and then you haven't seen the same place twice.

another admirable feature of LA is the possibility, thanks to all that asphalt, to go from a crazy urban wasteland to rugged, untouched nature. a few months ago I had a conversation with a guy that had lived in Los Angeles for more than ten years, and lives in Amsterdam now. we agreed on the nice things of Amsterdam, but what he really liked LA for was exactly this almost schizophrenic quality of the city of angels.

man has tried to civilize and 'asphaltize' Los Angeles for more than two hundred years, but places where he has failed to do so are plentiful. and finally, man has realized that these places need to be cherished, be cleaned and be left alone. don't see it as a defeat, see it as a reckoning of our own boundaries.

can you imagine?

>> 40 minutes >>

stupid rules, paid for by stupid people

last night, in da club (as we like to say on da eastside, across the river), two 'o clock am sharp, i was once again confronted with one of LA's most absurdly executes laws: no alcohol after two.

don't get me wrong, i do understand the apparent necessity for this rule. after all, we don't want all them drunkards hittin' the road all at once, creating rampage on the asphalt. stop at two, give them another two hours to cool down and everybody is happy.

it itches in the implementation of the rule.

cut. back to the club, 2 am. i am enjoying my freshly purchased coke, when this guy, type muscle brain, walks up to me and asks me if i am going to drink the drink. it goes a little something like this:

him, big guy > you gonna drink that?

me, small guy > i thought so, yeah.

big guy > now?

small guy > well, i'd like to take my time...

big guy > now?

small guy > you want me to down it? i can't down a glass of coke on command, it's nasty.

big guy > it's the law, if not, the cops show up and close the joint down. so give it.

small guy > the law is nasty.

now the big guy takes the coke from the small guy and tosses it in the trash.

i love this country.

---

see: the DFA DJ tour 2007

watch: best in show (2000)

let's just privatize the ish out of it...

... and leave other parts to rot.

that's todays theme. some of you might have heard of it, others not. it's called skidrow and it is the shit. the smelly shit.

what is basically is, next to the shit, is a bunch of homeless people living on the streets. not the back alleys but the middle of downtown los angeles. anybody who has read "city of quartz" by mike davis might have an idea of it, but it actually is much worse.

imagine yourself on a music festival, say pukkelpop (my most recent festival experience). you are on the campsite, and it's full of people living in a rather rudimentary fashion. tents, caravans and a few motorhomes. but only for three days, four at most. now, cut back to downtown LA. it is like pukkelpop, but more permanent and nastier.

it really makes me wonder what decision lead to such a strange urban appearance. apparently, skidrow is moving. and what is moving it? right, money. slowly but surely downtown is being repopulated again by the more wealthy and more creative part of society. they just don't want any bums on their doorstep.

not only rem koolhaas is going east, the homeless are also on an eastward course. how long for them to cross the LA river?

 

on the other hand, we have redondo beach.

you have the sea, you have the beach AND you have the seaside open-air swimming pool. pay up bitch! and there is no other option. for next to the beach you have this.

see you next time.

The war on terror: new deal '06

not only is the war on terror costing a lot of lives on all sides, both good and evil, it is also, praise the lord, generating a lot of jobs. jobs you'd, say ten years ago, would think of as impossible. cfdr would still be alive, he would turn over in his grave...

so here's the top something of useless jobs in the name of freedom and democracy.

1. the inevitable garbage-can checker. this one actually exists. they look sharp, they are fast paced and they look if there are no dirty bombs in the trashcan you just threw your empty coke bottle in.

2. the shoelace official. 'is this a normal shoelace, sir?' if you dare to say no, get yourself ready for a nice interview in some dodgy backroom.

3. k-9 interrogator. for all your subversive bff's.

4. the embedded journalist. aka 'i forgot the golden rule of journalism'. be independent or be square, please.

that's it. in the air inbetween chi city and the city of angels.

#2. wikipedia is for suckers and i love it.

issue number one. this is my second post, and since the first one was just a startup, let's clear the books, go tabula rasa and consider this the first one.

since a blog is useless if there's nothing to discuss or nothing interesting on it (i don't care where you have been, or what food your cat has eaten; i absolutely do not care how a coffee machine makes a nice cup of coffee and i certainly do not want to know how long it takes for a certain material to release one drop of something) i make the statement right here and right now. if you don't care about anything, do not read this blog... if you are interested in everyday observations about everyday things, you might find this interesting. if not, no pun.

anyway, back to the topic. and today's topic is wikipedia. i used to work as a student-assistent at my university in delft.  one of my jobs was maintaining and updating the chair's wikipedia account. this basically meant writing stories on underground construction technologies, tunneling work and built underground structures.  sounds pretty boring, but fortunately wikipedia is not only an online encyclopedia, it is also a community of social rejects.

just pressing the 'random article' button a few times, and you end up with the most obscure items possible. fun to read, but even more fun to watch the reactions. in wikiworld, you have obsessive-compulsive attraction seekers (bit like bloggers i guess), you have people who like to abuse their powers and you have, well, just call them losers. people that never had anything to say, nobody to have to listen to them and nobody who cared about them.

for them, wikipedia is a 21st century saviour. its openness gives them a place to ventilate all their obsessions and passions. and other people to condemn them. go forth and intensify. go to wikipedia.org and see for yourself. one tip: look for 'fancrud' and you'll have a great time for sure.

issue number two. in two days i am leaving for los angeles, to live there for six months. i don't feel anxious about it. is this a bad thing or something very general? i don't know, but i'd like to.

and then the usual linkbombing at the end.

read: republish

watch: subtopia

listen&watch: justice vs simian - we are your friends

good night.

start up

right here, behind or in front my computer, new order's krafty (the glimmers dub version) in my headphone, thinking about what to write.

tomorrow i'm leaving for pukkelpop, crazy festival in belgium. think that's it for tonight.

sweet dreams.