Showing posts with label videos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label videos. Show all posts
Blue Sunset
We ended last year with one of our favorite photos of the decade: an extraterrestrial sunset photographed in 2005 by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. We thought we'd end this year with another Martian sunset. This one was captured last month by Spirit's twin, Opportunity, in a series of photographs, which the rover science team combined and enhanced to create a seamless simulated descent. A bonus footage included in the embedded video above shows the moon Phobos passing in front of the sun.
Watch it with music here.
Soft Brackets
In case you need reminding, you now only have exactly one month to submit to Bracket 2.
Bracket 2 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic amongst others—the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems.
...
Bracket 2 seeks to critically position and define soft systems, in order to expand the scope and potential for new spatial networks, and new formats of architecture, urbanization and nature. From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 questions the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design.
And in case you've yet to begin work on your submission and need a starting point, check out these videos of landslides and the infrastructural counter-measures to mitigate and manage an ever shifting landscape.
Arbor tremuloides
A lazy post for a lazy Monday, but hopefully you'll find it interesting. It's a short clip from Our Daily Bread, a feature-length documentary produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter.
Having never wondered how pecans and walnuts are harvested on an industrial scale and then seeing how it's actually done for the first time, we were quite taken aback. It was as if discovering a new species of marine animal thriving in the violent hydrothermal whirlpools of some deep-oceanic trench — spectacularly ornamented, wondrously strange, marvelous.
Our reaction obviously says more about how far removed we are from the means of food production than anything about an inherent quality, but agricultural landscapes never fail to astonish us.
On agro
Having never wondered how pecans and walnuts are harvested on an industrial scale and then seeing how it's actually done for the first time, we were quite taken aback. It was as if discovering a new species of marine animal thriving in the violent hydrothermal whirlpools of some deep-oceanic trench — spectacularly ornamented, wondrously strange, marvelous.
Our reaction obviously says more about how far removed we are from the means of food production than anything about an inherent quality, but agricultural landscapes never fail to astonish us.
On agro
Ensuring the Future of Food in Japan
Here's an educational video from Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. It's remarkable for making very complex, interconnected issues — i.e., food security, public health, global trade, energy and geography — more readily understandable. And in under 5 minutes! Quite an amazing feat.
It's rather reminiscent of the ephemeral films made by government agencies and corporations of 1950s America. The production quality here is more slick, but it's still propaganda, a brand of social engineering instilling institutional definitions of patriotism and good citizenship. Good Japanese eat Japanese food.
Cultural hegemony via pastel colors and infographics porn.
There should be more of these made everywhere.
On agro
Reveal Me
Earth-Fountain Spotted!
A motorist in Al Ahsaa City, Saudi Arabia captured these few minutes of the earth exhaling. It's lo-res, cinematically shaky but still a sight to behold, wondrous and sublime. As it must be commented on — for it's hardly unnoticeably — we are told that the soundtrack is an exaltation of one or several of the divine's multitudinous attributes but we are sure it's a paean to the hidden but knowable geological forces at work eternally shaping the landscape. And just slightly off camera are a flock of demoiselles about to re-enact Busby Berkeley's famous pyramid fountain of lascivious ladyflesh. Of course.
Earth-Fountain
Earth-Fountain Redux
Granular Blitzkrieg
“A wound in the geological bowels of the earth”
Earthquake Van
One of Nagano Prefecture's earthquake experience vehicles, wherein foreigners can get acclimated with or a preview of the common and the really big tectonic events. Go see it in action.
Portable Hurricane
Disaster Lab
Poseidon vs. Aeolus
15 Storeys High
15 Storeys High is a British television show set in a South London tower block, created by Sean Lock, Martin Trenaman, Mark Lamarr (as Mark Jones), and Mark Nunneley, and whose run of 12 episodes over 2 series ended in 2003.
It has been described to us at various times thusly: “better than The Office”; “what would have been if Krzysztof Kieslowski had conceived Dekalog as a British sitcom”; “the beginnings of a brilliant but ultimately failed Ballardian musical dark comedy”; “architorture by boredom, exquisitely executed”; “a desultory dissertation on post-occupancy, the psychology of space, and Polish energy drinks”; “a damning statement on the impotency of architects in designing anything well except chairs”; “a landscape architect's erotic nightmare”; and as “shit”.
Of course, one of those microreviews is pure gibberish. Another one is made up. Three have actually been cobbled up together from minimally-remembered, drunken conversations, and two more were said by colleagues after seeing only one episode. Exactly one is an accurate description.
It's worth checking out, legally or extralegally, in other words.
And in case you're wondering, some clips of the show have been uploaded to YouTube.
Reveal Me
Dear H5,
We absolutely love the music video you did for Röyksopp's single Remind Me. It's brilliant, to say the least. And to say that we've seen it on YouTube dozens of times and then many times more afterwards would not be an exaggeration.
We also love the commercial you guys made for the French energy conglomerate Areva. We're not huge fans of nuclear power plants, but watching how uranium mined in Canada ends up lighting a dance floor somewhere in China via maps, graphs, isometric projections, sectional cut-outs, flowcharts and systems diagrams — all to the groovy disco beats of Funkytown — really made us want to buy shares in the company.
Have you seen the parody that someone made of the ad, by the way? If not, you guys should really check it out. It's hilarious.
Funnily enough all three videos remind us of our childhood — those groggy Saturday mornings waiting to see if ABC might again broadcast Conjunction Junction or any of the number of Schoolhouse Rock! cartoons showing us how the various parts of our bodies work; and those halcyon after-school afternoons watching Mister Rogers tour a factory and learn how familiar items like crayons, stuffed animals, spoons, and zippers get mass produced in a sort of mesmerizing Fordist ballet.
But we're not writing this open letter to tell you guys all about our television staple when we were
About 20 seconds in Remind Me were devoted to it, but we think it deserves a longer treatment, if not a full cinematic homage to the diagram. Don't you agree?
No doubt you are quite familiar with what goes on, but for the unenlightened, here are the search results from Google Images for “wastewater treatment” and “sewage treatment”. Additionally, this Wikipedia entry gives a nice introduction, although some parts might be confusingly too detailed.
Most people don't know much about what goes on at the treatment plant. For one thing, they are generally zoned out to the urban periphery. The more segregated they are from the populace, the better. The more they get unnoticed visually, aurally and olfactorily — again, the better. And yet sewers practically underpin modern civilization. Without them, it would be hard to imagine how megalopolises like New York City could have come into existence and then thrived. Their importance is such that people should sacrifice a virgin every year among the filtration towers, aeration tanks and Daphnias. Or to absolutely ensure that no empires and nations will crumble: two virgins.
Oh, sure, our readers will remind us that Chicago has a recycling facility located right next to the city's most popular tourist destination and in the shadow of Oprah Winfrey's palatial condo, but it's so unassuming, so pedestrian that it hardly draws much attention to itself. New Haven, Connecticut had the right idea when they asked Stephen Holl to design their facility. So many people wrote about it, most recently in Wired. Herbert Mushcamp wrote about it in the New York Times way back in 2001, calling it “poetically expressive”, but on Michael Van Valkenburgh, Holl's co-designer, he judged him to be “a splashy form maker but not a sophisticated thinker.” Ouch! Muschamp was probably right, but we've always wondered whether Nicolai Ouroussoff inherited his philistine indifference towards landscape architecture from his predecessor.
We're sure you don't give a fuck about Nicolai or his myopic architectural reportage, but we can't remember the last time people's shit (as a spatial concern) got this level of coverage. Ideally, the process alone should generate mass enthusiasm, but it seems celebrities need to be involved to stir interest. And even then that kind of attention is always fleeting.
And another thing, a lot of people have yet to fully grasp the often monumental task of channeling our shit from anywhere in the city all the way to these treatment plants, something that always boggles our mind. Sewers are understandably hidden. There's the issue of public health, for one, and there's also the matter of property values — Not In My Backyard, that sort of thing.
But apart from manhole covers and storm drains and maybe a bump in the road where a pipe got too close to the asphalt, there isn't a lot of surface evidence. They're everywhere, rhizomatically entrenched, and yet only when a main sewer line gets clogged and stinks up the neighborhood or when there's an outbreak of cholera or when some photogenic kid falls in and an entire nation becomes hysterical, engrossed by the endless media coverage of the heroic rescue, does this all-pervasive subterranean landscape momentarily reveal itself to us, and we wonder then where our shit actually ends up. But such contemplation should be performed on a daily basis.
So this is where you guys come in. An H5 music video (avant-doc?) will certainly get copious amount of airplay on MTV2, even if it's about sewage. Your style is eye-popping, though definitely not intellectually vacuous; it is so hyper-slick that it will inject some glamour to an otherwise unglamorous subject. Predictably, someone will upload it to YouTube, where millions will watch it. Many more will embed it on their blogs or use it to further disfigure their MySpace pages. Bored interns will e-mail it to everyone. It'll be the new viral video, ingeniously parodied endlessly by yet more bored interns. One such parody on the near nonexistent wastewater treatment of Mumbai will appear on VH1's Best Week Ever, E!'s The Soup, Bravo's Outrageous and Contagious Viral Videos, and several other pop cultural affairs programs.
And then joy upon joy, the appalling state of ignorance and popular apathy towards wastewater treatment is reversed.
So how about it? Let us know.
Sincerely,
Pruned
Sailing to Chernobyl
Anouk de Clercq, Joris Cool, and Eavesdropper are your tour guides to Kernwasser Wunderland, a “deserted landscape” of “abandonment and brooding emptiness,” where the asphyxiated din and howls of a former ecology are replaced by the boisterous clicking of a geiger counter.
But could they perhaps have taken us to the surface of the sun? Maybe to a future Guangxi, malignant and brackish?
Wherever you might have gone to, listen! Hear that? That's your DNA being sliced, repaired, and then snipped again. Hear that feedback loop? That's you being genetically recombined into a subspecies. And those incomprehensibly mesmerizing chants — the crackling, humming, ticking, whirring, pulsing, buzzing, throbbing from the deep? Those are the birth pangs of new landscapes borne out of contamination. New biotopes for new species.
Terrain Fantastic
Siting the Disaster
Two years ago, a piece of a mountain in Japan self-mutilated. Luckily for us, it was captured on video, which can be downloaded from YouTube.
Hope no one is repulsed if I simply link to this classic BLDGBLOG post, wherein Geoff Manaugh via John McPhee describes “how architecture can survive in the fallout paths of rock slides, debris slugs, and other flows of geologic mass wasting.” And also to this post here on Pruned, in which the formative potential of a different kind of disaster, i.e., the super-crowd, in landscape design is covered.
Hope no one is repulsed if I simply link to this classic BLDGBLOG post, wherein Geoff Manaugh via John McPhee describes “how architecture can survive in the fallout paths of rock slides, debris slugs, and other flows of geologic mass wasting.” And also to this post here on Pruned, in which the formative potential of a different kind of disaster, i.e., the super-crowd, in landscape design is covered.
Terrain Fantastic
Here's another music video, or rather a flash animation. It's Lord Whimsy for Momus acting the part of an interplanetary Linnaeus on another of his transdimensional horticultural expeditions. Captain Nemo seems to have had the lesser fantastic voyage.
Protoflorafauna, or: 7 “terrestrial activities of aliens,” Part VI
Some have speculated this to be a video of a newly discovered breeding ground for the next generation of Superviruses. Amidst the steam and din of the jungle, roboticized tendrils fold HIV into Ebloa intermingling with SARS-polio hybrids. But many believe it's a covert recording of an arboretum tended to by a reclusive multi-billionaire Dubai sheik intent on invasively populating The World. Still others think it's the long lost Garden of Earthly Delights, the setting to so many of Don Aguirre's
The Technolicious Arboretum
Extreme Horticulture
Revival Field
Woof!
Bouffant Topiary
Edouard François
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