Planetaki Planet Future Interactions

15 Minutes with CityEngine and Lumion....

2012-02-11T07:07:30Z

A quick weekend post - following on from our first look at CityEngine and Lumion we have expanded the visualisation to add in various standard items from the Lumion library along with a surrounding terrain and waterside setting:

Total development time is 15 minutes with rendering 1.5 hours, its getting quicker to make cities....

Interview (in French) at 36-15

2012-02-10T22:57:55Z

No, it’s not a minitel service, it’s just called 36-15, and it’s a cool new podcast in French about digital innovation by Laurent (“L’émission qui se demande si le 21e siècle est une bonne idée”).

Last week, I’ve been interviewed on my book about failures and it’s located there on the infosphere.

Initial Points

2012-02-09T13:18:40Z

[Image: Initial Points: Anchors of America's Grid at the Center for Land Use Interpretation].

A new exhibition at the Center for Land Use Interpretation opened last week, called Initial Points: Anchors of America's Grid, produced in collaboration with the Institute of Marking and Measuring.

Through maps, surveying devices, and other artifacts from the process of land marking and measurement, the exhibition "depicts and describes the 37 Initial Points of the Public Land Survey System, the rectilinear grid that covers more than two thirds of the landscape of the USA. These surveying points, located in places such as swamps, under manhole covers, in roads, and on top of mountains, are the physical locations that tie this grid to the ground. Looking at them in a contemporary context explores the process and importance of the endeavor of surveying, and reveals a latent cadastral history of the nation as it expanded westward."

[Image: A view of the exhibition at CLUI].

An earlier program at CLUI looked at U.S./Mexico border-survey markers, which documented 276 "obelisks" placed at the very limit of the nation, monumentalizing and literalizing a particular vision of state territory.

Initial Points—foregrounding the tools and training that allow state delineation or what we might call "ground control"—is on display until April 15, 2012.

CityEngine: ESRI and Lumion a first look.

2012-02-09T13:36:31Z

Yesterday a license for CityEngine landed on our desk from the nice people at ESRI and to be honest we were a little too excited for our own good, after all its only software. However, CityEngine and its integration with ESRI ArcGIS, while maintaining full export capabilities to load into 3DMax/Lumion/Unity etc, is a game changer.

It moves GIS visualisation a step forward while at the same time bringing procedural city modelling into the mainstream game engine world. Over the coming weeks we will be putting the software through its paces and exporting into Max/Lumion and Unity as part of introducing CityEngines onto our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation. The clip below details out first output direct from CityEngine into Lumion, adding in a general landscape, sample trees and transport objects:

Linking in our previous post on ArcGIS Twitter Visualisation in Lumion it seems that the worlds of GIS and architectural visualisation/game engines are finally starting to become accessible.

Links for 2012-02-08 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-09T13:18:38Z

The Deleted City
"The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century (...) Geocities, a free webhosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighbourhood based on the subject of your homepage. (...) he homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted. (...). The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history."

Demo - Live 3D Kinect Streaming: The Future of Webcams

2012-02-08T21:17:10Z

George MacKerron here in CASA has been looking at using a Kinect or three in our forthcoming ANALOGIES (Analogues of Cities) conference + exhibition.

Inspired in part by Ruairi Glynn‘s amazing work here at UCL, along with Martin at CASA who has been happily experimenting with the OpenKinect bindings for Processing, George has recently got to grips with the excellent Three.js, which makes WebGL — aka 3D graphics in modern browsers. As a fan of making things accessible over the web he has begun to investigate prospects for working with Kinect data in HTML5 and the results are intriguing - a live 3D, movable webcam...

View the live stream here or click on the screenshot to connect (note it needs Chrome at the moment), you can also pan and zoom around with the mouse. Hopefully George will be at his desk for the full effect.

For those without Chrome, the movie below details the concept:

We view this as a glimpse of the future of webcams, the next step is to up the resolution (bandwidth heavy) and add image data. The implications for video conferencing or indeed that industry that academically we probably cant mention are notable...

Take a look at the blog post from George for full technical details.

Taxi! Data Viz of 10,000 Taxi's in Manhattan

2012-02-08T12:46:08Z

Taxi! is an analytical model that maps the trip data for 10,000 taxi rides over the course of 24 hours. Geographic location data for the origin and destination of each ride is combined with waypoint data collected from the Google Maps API in order to generate a geographically accurate representation of the trip:

Taxi! from Juan Francisco Saldarriaga on Vimeo. The team used data from taxi rides originating or ending in the neighborhoods of Lincoln center or Bryant Park. The visualization recreates a ‘breathing’ map of Manhattan based on the migration of vehicles across the city over a period of 24 hours, displaying periods of intensity, density and decreased activity.

This project was a collaboration between Tom McKeogh, Eliza Montgomery and Juan F Saldarriaga. It was done for SEARCH class taught by Mark Collins and Toru Hasegawa (Proxy), at GSAPP, Columbia University, Fall 2011.

As part of the reseach they acknowledge the support of the CUNY High Performance Computing Center under NSF Grants No. CNS-0855217 and No. CNS-0958379.

For any additional information please contact Juan Francisco Saldarriaga at jfs2118@columbia.edu

As a side note we also like the music by Rob Viola of statikluft.com/

Links for 2012-02-07 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-08T12:28:20Z

GET LOST! | Rob Ray
"GET LOST! asks people to become "disorienteers" losing their way and rediscovering wonder, helplessness, and imagination using tools they would normally use to find their way. The sense of calm that comes from knowing where you are at all times can be reassuring, but also a bit boring."
AWOL — A Guide To Getting Lost — The Pop-Up City
"Recent Chelsea College of Art & Design graduate Dan Cottrell has created a guide for the sole aim of getting lost. Pyschogeography is nothing new, but AWOL provides a beautifully simple design approach to the subject."
Gamasutra - Features - Jerked Around by the Magic Circle - Clearing the Air Ten Years Later
"1. Nobody actually holds the orthodox view of the magic circle. There is no circle jerk behind the curtain. 2. While it was based on a passing term Frank Lantz and I noticed in Homo Ludens, Katie Salen and I more or less introduced the concept of the magic circle as it is used today. Blame us for all the trouble, not Huizinga. 3. Keep in mind the discipline from which a work or idea originated. Don't dismiss concepts in one field of knowledge because it doesn't fit your own discipline. The onus is on each of us to translate ideas from the outside into our own areas. 4. The magic circle, as put forward in Rules of Play, is the relatively simple idea that when a game is being played, new meanings are generated. These meanings mix elements intrinsic to the game and elements outside the game. 5. In my opinion, design concepts (such as the magic circle as described in Rules of Play) derive their value from their utility to solve problems."
Bundle
"Bundle was born from the idea that people need real insights and ratings on the places we go, not just subjective opinions. Bundle uses data from the U.S. government, from aggregated, anonymized spending transactions from Citi, and from other third party sources to derive personalized recommendations on restaurants, bars and shops. You can find out what type of people go to a place, how often people really go back to a place, and get recommendations on where you should go based on places you already like."

Devices showing their inner selves

2012-02-07T20:04:23Z

I found this gem on the website of the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories:

“Meggy Jr RGB is a new kit that we designed as a platform to develop handheld pixel games. It’s based around a fully addressable 8×8 RGB LED matrix display, and features six big fat buttons for comfy game play. (…) A unique feature of Meggy Jr RGB is that it is designed to be mounted inside a “handle set” — a wooden or plastic case that’s safer and more pleasant to hold than a bare circuit board. You can make, mod and customize your own handle sets to suit your taste– These are like faceplates in that you can switch whenever you want to suit your mood or the game that you’re playing, however different handle sets can radically change what the Meggy Jr looks and feels like. Above, you can see what our basic handles (left) look like, as compared to a set of custom smoke-colored batwing handles (right).“

And you can even make your own handle (or to have them fabbed) on platforms such as Ponoko or Pololu. I’d be curious to test it and see whether the interface itself is easy to play with, without a shell.

Why do I blog this? What fascinates me, beyond the fab/open platform, is the device aesthetic. That might be the equivalent of Centre George Pompidou (Beaubourg) for digital devices! Showing the internal guts of a technical apparatus is an intriguing approach that can be traced back to other architecture/industrial design traditions. It can be about making things visible and transparent to the users/people.

It also reminds me of this Mehmet Erkök’s Extreme Personalization phones. The phone shell, personalized in a very expressive way, can be seen as an interesting approach to customization:

Journal: Alppila at Salmisaari, black soots in Ruoholahti

2012-02-07T11:41:52Z

I swear I can still taste the coal dust in my mouth, nine hours later. Marco had noticed the soot in the snow first. Looking down from our vantage point on the 14th floor of our tower in Ruoholahti, we get a good view of the Finnish-registered coail carrier, the Alppila, unloading its cargo into the hoppers on the dockside of Kellosaari.

The hoppers direct the coal down to a tunnel, which then stretches some 700m to the west of Ruoholahti. The coal is then subsumed into the Salmisaari power station, a 1953 job owned by Helsinki Energia. Even though the distributed system of energy generation and district heating is profoundly smart for any modern city, and particularly a city with the heating/cooling loads and geography of Helsinki (see this earlier descent into the depths), I hope I don't need to point out the (now inexcusable) problems with coal-powered generation.

Despite growing up in the north of England, it's a strange feeling to see a large chimney billowing smoke above a neighbourhood. You just don't see that in those post-industrial cities anymore, and haven't done for decades. The air from Ruoholahti chimney may not be as dirty as it once was, although you'd hardly want a toke on it, but the days of recent persistent snow suddenly made legible this form of energy. (You may know this chimney from the Nuage Vert installation.)

Leaving aside the carbon footprint of these old stations, what struck Marco and I was its more immediately apparent footprint, suddenly highlighted by the combination of snow-covered land and frozen sea with bright sun, even from a kilometre away. The Alppila was clearly sitting in a large and growing halo of black coal dust, a smudge on the pristine white seascape.

I went for a walk with my camera. Approaching from the north, and still several hundred metres away from the dock, I could immediately see that the snow downwind of the Alppila was covered with a thin film of coal dust. This is an entirely unnatural landscape at the best of times — Ruoholahti is essentially 1910 landfill joining three or four islands — and people need energy, but still.

Along the banks of the canal to my left, I see miniature landscapes of snowy striations drawn by the wind whipping up from the bay.

There's something awful and beautiful about these patterns, and particularly the grainy grey sweeps of soot falling across the sea frozen solid around the ship.

The white of the newer snow on the Ruoholahti canal easily offsets the black ridges on its banks. Still well downwind of the ship, the air suddenly starts tasting of coal.

I plunge my hand into the deep snow to describe the difference. There's a crust of black particulate covering everything. Closer, on the now-filthy bridge adjacent to the Alppila, I step in up to my knees to take a photo of the sea - each footstep plunges deep into pure white, clearly marking how dirty the bridge is afterwards.

The ice around the ship is bright white on one side and deep grey on the other, the wind curling the black dust around the lee side of the ship, a cruel sketch of what at first looks like a shadow, but is simply a thick coat of coal dust on snow and ice.

Tracking the Alppila on marinetraffic.com, it looks like it's come in from Vyotsk, Russia. Vyotsk was a minor strategic node in the brutal battles between Finland and Russia during World War II, but is now a small town with a major strategic port shifting oil and coal to the west, with over 2 billion tonnes of the latter exported last year. But the coal carrier is not going to see Russia anytime today, sitting gripped by thick ice generated by the last few days of -20C temperatures. It's a brutish looking thing, described in the evocative language of shipping as "Lloyd’s Register +100 A1 Bulk Carrier, Ice Class 1 A Super", but the entire Baltic is sold as far as the eye can see.

There's no-one visible on-board the ship. I stand on the tram bridge perpendicular to the ship, along with a few others 20 metres away towards the boldly cantilevered F-Secure building, watching what looks like an automated operation, ship as robot. Smoke billows from the ship announcing another dumper of coal swinging gracefully through the cold air.

The Alppila's black cranes continue to empty coal into the hoppers and down into the ground, soft clouds of soot drifting over the residential neighbourhood downwind.

Coal landing at Salmisaari [Flickr]

Links for 2012-02-05 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-06T11:04:30Z

Robot readable world on Vimeo
"How do robots see the world? How do they extract meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? This is an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye."

One-eyed robot

2012-02-06T11:04:30Z

Found in Hotel by Boichi, a Japanese manga that I only found in French.

Why do I blog this? I like the way the one-eyed face has been turned into something more human-readable through basic pencil drawings. This may be the equivalent of the “Transmetropolitan” smiley face.

How to dismantle your door: A Man Escaped (1956)

2012-02-06T11:04:31Z

[Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC—continued last week with Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956). Spoilers ahead!

Bresson's film tells the story of Fontaine—a French prisoner held by Nazis in a prison in occupied Lyon—and it operates through the "close scrutiny of salient details," in Roger Ebert's words. Fontaine himself becomes an avid student of the prison interior, always looking askance for points of weakness. This has the effect of explicitly foregrounding the space of confinement in which Fontaine is held, including, as we'll see, the objects in the cell with him, deemphasizing characterization in favor of an intense focus on architectural setting. Ebert continues:

In this way, we watch Fontaine examine his cell. We know it as well as he does. We see how he stands on a shelf to look out a high, barred window. We see how the food plates enter and leave, and how the guards can see him through a peep hole. We see the routine as prisoners are marched to morning wash-up.

Amongst these daily routines, we watch Fontaine slip a note into a fellow prisoner's pocket. What does the note say? "The exit route from the building and how to dismantle your door," Fontaine explains.

[Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

As usual, I want to focus only on specific spatial details, in keeping with the premise of Breaking Out and Breaking In, so I'll just make two quick points.

1) Breaking out, in A Man Escaped, occurs through the strategic dismantling and reassembly of all designed objects that aren't architecture. Blankets are cut down to strips then rewoven into rope, finally wrapped and strengthened with wire from the bedframe. A small cupboard doorframe is refashioned into grappling hooks. A mere spoon—then another—is sharpened to a chisel with which to cut through the soft wood of the cell door.

It's as if the tools of escape are, in fact, already hidden all around us, disguised as the overlooked equipment of everyday life—the mundane bits of furniture, clothing, and internal ornament that, provided we teach ourselves how to reassemble them, will lead to an unparalleled state of post-architectural liberation. Put another way, the limits of architecture are exposed by everything normally stored inside it.

[Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

2) The other obvious detail is the film's overriding non-visual dimension—that is to say, the sound design of solitary confinement.

From the coded coughs of fellow inmates to the banister-tapping approach of a particular guard, and from the reciprocated wall-taps knocked prisoner to prisoner to the soundscape of the final escape itself—with the other-worldly grinding gears of a patrol bicycle and the marching feet on gravel that betray a guard who the escapees might not otherwise have seen—the prison is more an acoustic environment than a visual one. Even the timing of Fontaine and his last-minute assistant, as they scamper across the prison rooftop, is coincident with the passing of a nearby train, using the sonic effects of urban infrastructure as camouflage for their actions.

They thus navigate from ring to ring, passing steadily outward, carrying reconstructed ropes made from bedding and forcibly recurved grappling hooks, arming the building's contents against the building itself, disguised by the sounds of a city into which they successfully disappear.

(Earlier: A Prison Camp is for Escaping. Up next: watch Cool Hand Luke on Monday, February 6; for the complete Breaking Out and Breaking In schedule, click here).

Making Planning Popular

2012-02-06T03:05:37Z

[Image: Making Planning Popular on display at the RCA in London].

For those of you near London, you have one more day to see David Knight's Making Planning Popular on display in a group show called GRIST at the Royal College of Art. I'm a huge fan of Knight's work—an ongoing research project on the strange terrains both encouraged and required by local planning ordinances—and he's thus become a regular referent here on the blog.

[Image: The manifesto from Making Planning Popular].

Specifically, Making Planning Popular "aims to encourage greater popular knowledge of how the built environment is, or could be, produced." Accordingly, "David is showing a manifesto, recent articles and essays, and a series of case studies chosen from his growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices. This work will in time form a popular history of planning"—publishers, take note!—"one in which such practises are brought back to life to explore their relevance to today’s environment, in the belief that putting planning knowledge back into popular culture will lead to a more democratic built environment."

[Images: Excerpts from David Knight's "growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices," part of Making Planning Popular].

Above are some examples of these case studies; but stop by the RCA before the end of the day on Monday, February 6, to see more. Here's a map.

Object Cancers

2012-02-06T03:05:38Z

There was a lot of talk last week about the emergence of "physibles," or downloadable data sets hosted on the Pirate Bay that would allow (potentially copyrighted) objects to be reproduced at home by 3D printers. The idea is that we won't just share music files or movie torrents, but actual physical objects; I could thus print an IKEA table or a Quistgaard peppermill at home, without ever purchasing an original object.

[Image: A printer known as the Replicator].

Bruce Sterling wrote about just such a scenario in his 2008 novella Kiosk, suggesting that a new "poetry of commerce" would arise in the form of infinitely repeatable, unregulated objects churned out by desktop factories.

Among many other things about this story, what caught my attention was the specific detail that you could scan any object you happen to have on hand; you could then upload that dataset to a kind of eBay of physibles; and, finally, someone on the other side of the earth—or sitting right next to you—could print out their own "pirate" version. As New Scientist writes, however, we might soon soon see a corporate response in the form of what might be called physible rights management—based on, even repeating, certain aspects of the misguided digital rights management (DRM) policies associated with MP3s. This would mean, for instance, "placing a marker on objects that a 3D scanner could detect and which would stop it operating" (though such marks, the article quickly points out, can simply be covered over with tape or otherwise occluded); in fact, we read, a similar such system is "already used to prevent banknotes from being photocopied." The article then mentions other forms of watermarks and "marking algorithms," detectable only by machines, that could be inscribed onto object surfaces, like invisible hieroglyphs of protection, so as to interfere with those objects' being scanned.

The corporate response to the robot-readable world, mentioned earlier, is thus a kind of robot-blocking world.

In any case, what seems more provocative here, on the level of design, would be to appropriate this protective stance and reuse it in the design of future objects, but emphasizing the other end: to allow for the scanning of any object designed or manufactured, but to to insert, in the form of watermarks, small glitches that would only become visible upon reprinting.

We might call these object cancers: bulbous, oddly textured, and other dramatically misshapen errors that only appear in 3D-reprinted objects. Chairs with tumors, mutant silverware, misbegotten watches—as if the offspring of industrial reproducibility is a molten world of Dalí-like surrealism.

[Image: Misprinted objects by Zeitguised and Matt Frodsham].

Put another way, the inadvertent side-effect of the attempted corporate control over objects would be an artistic potlatch of object errors: object cancers deliberately reprinted, shared, and collected for their monstrous and unexpected originality.

Landscape Architecture for Machines

2012-02-06T03:05:38Z

One of the more interesting sub-conversations at last fall's Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art revolved around the question of whether or not the future of landscape architecture would be for humans at all—and not for autonomous or semi-autonomous machine systems that will have their own optical, textural, and haptic needs from the design of built space. As highway signage networks are adapted to assist with orienting driverless cars, for instance, we will see continent-spanning pieces of infrastructure designed not for human aesthetic needs but so that they more efficiently correspond to the instrumentation packages of machines.

We touched on this a few weeks ago here on BLDGBLOG with the idea of sentient geotextiles guiding unmanned aerial vehicles, and London-based design firm BERG refers to this as the rise of the robot-readable world. I was thus interested to see that Timo Arnall from BERG has assembled a short video archive asking, "How do robots see the world? How do they extract meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us?" Arnall's compilation reveals the framing geometries—a kind of entoptic graphic language native to machines—and directional refocusings deployed by these inhuman users of designed landscapes. Future gardens optimized for autonomous robot navigation.

Links for 2012-02-04 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-05T11:22:33Z

patachronic clock

Links for 2012-02-03 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-04T11:52:08Z

MapAttack
"Why Build a Real-Time Geofencing Game? We wanted to create a game that allowed people to physically interact with the real world instead of a computer console like a first person shooter or a real-time strategy game. We were inspired by playing a real-life version of Pac-Man called Pacmanhattan, invented by graduate students at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU in 2004. We played it at Portland WhereCamp conference in 2008, and we wanted to see if we could make a GPS-based version of the game, as Pacmanhattan relied entirely on phone calls and physical maps."

“it’s not the strangeness of the work as much as their thinking process that counts”

2012-02-03T11:57:06Z

An interesting excerpt from the interaction12 day1 report by Johnny Holland about Antony Dunne’s speech “Crafting Design Speculations”:

“One audience member did ask the obvious question: where is the role for such out there work in everyday interaction design? His answer was that these students come from work and many return to the commercial field being employed by big corporations: it’s not the strangeness of the work as much as their thinking process that counts.“

Why do I blog this? that’s simply a good quote/answer to the question since it reflects the value of design.

Links for 2012-02-02 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-03T11:57:07Z

Design Futurescaping
Bruce Sterling about Anab Jain's work

Data Space: Agent Based Models, SketchUp, Visualisation, ArcGIS and Lumion

2012-02-02T20:16:58Z

Over the past few weeks we have been exploring exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. Developed as part our Masters course in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation we are now looking into issues of scale, realtime rendering, rapid visualisation and 3D exhibition spaces.

Regular readers will know we have been exploring Unity due its interactive nature and ability to import various file types into its game engine (see Particles, Agents and Emergent Behaviour ). Unity is still an option but for rapid visualisation Lumion also offers distinct possibilities. The movie below details our first draft example of building an exhibition space (SketchUp), retexturing and adding various crowd/delegate models (3DMax) and the Twitter map (ArcGIS) using Lumion:

If Lumion offered a stand alone viewer rather than purely movie based output then it would be our engine of choice. As such it is currently a weigh up between Lumion and Unity, our Unity example is under development, we will post it soon as we can...

Links for 2012-02-01 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-02T11:49:55Z

How Touchscreens Are Forcing the Reinvention of Keyboards

A Prison Camp is for Escaping: Grand Illusion (1937)

2012-02-01T03:29:42Z

[Image: Posters for Grand Illusion, currently out of print from the Criterion Collection].

For the first film in our Breaking Out and Breaking In distributed film fest—where you watch the films at home and return here to discuss them online—we watched Grand Illusion, a 1937 film directed by Jean Renoir, recently described as one of the 100 best films of world cinema (Seven Samurai, if you're curious, was #1).

I will limit myself to discussing Grand Illusion solely from the perspective of this film fest of prison breaks and bank heists (which will be true for all the films discussed in this series). In other words, I'll focus specifically on the topology of escape—on holes, tunnels, walls, and borders. And I should note: there are spoilers ahead.

[Images: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

The first attempted escape of the film is through the earth: tunneling from beneath the barracks of a German prison camp with the intention of popping up beyond the outer buildings, in a garden.

Removing the floorboards and hacking through exceptionally soft soil, the prisoners rig an alarm system and fashion a tentacular speaking-tube to make sure they all know if the person on digging duty has passed out in the carbon dioxide-rich microclimate being created by their tunneling activity. In fact, the speaking-tube—like an old-fashioned game of telephone—initially appears to be a breathing apparatus of some sort, as if they are, in fact, snorkeling through the earth.

[Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the digger—an irritatingly effusive French cabaret singer—loses consciousness, his candle goes out, and he must be hauled backward out of the mud by rope.

[Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

There are at least two particularly interesting things about this tunnel.

1) The diggers engage in an illicit earth-moving operation by filling their clothes with the resulting dirt, and then dumping the dirt into the garden. They're thus generating their own little artificial topography out in the prison yard as they scoop out the earth beneath their barracks house. The negative space of the tunnel becomes this new terrain of dirt piles and rows, which are thus symptoms of this literally underground activity.

[Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

2) More interestingly, the tunnel is soon abandoned: all of the prisoners are moved to new camps, the barracks are emptied, the tunnel still covered by floorboards, and a last-ditch attempt to let the incoming prisoners know that there is a half-completed escape tunnel beneath their bedroom fails. A train pulls away, splitting up the prisoners and bringing them to new camps; all the while, a remnant escape route, unfinished and unknown, lies waiting to be rediscovered.

Immediately before their departure, however, there is a brief exchange between two of the film's protagonists. Looking out at the clockwork machinations of the German guards, who march in synchrony across the prison courtyard, the imprisoned Captain de Boeldieu quips: "For me it's simple. A golf course is for golf. A tennis court for tennis. A prison camp is for escaping."

[Images: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

While this is by no means a remarkable piece of dialogue in and of itself, the notion that, internal to and implied by the diagram of the camp, there is a goal or proper use, but one that runs against the grain of the space's stated intentions. The camp is a landscape that necessitates its own peculiar misuse; escape is just the sport that actualizes this. Put another way, the design of the camp rigorously implies its own escape routes.

Further to this point, however, and as evidenced by the casual manner with which our sporting gentlemen pack up their rackets and coats and abandon their incomplete tunnel, their behavior is motivated more by following unspoken rules (of war, of the camp, of sporting etiquette) than, in a sense, by trying to win.

In any case, from this point in the film it's onward, out and further, through a series of other camps—shown solely in montage—before the displaced captives arrive at an imposing mountaintop fortress—filmed at the Châteaux du Haut-Koenigsbourg— run by the wounded Von Rauffenstein (who, to my mind, looks remarkably like Darth Vader without a helmet, as seen in Return of the Jedi).

Von Rauffenstein takes his new forced guests on a fortifications tour, walking around the castle's walls. "Nice castle," one of them remarks, as another methodically recites the centuries of original construction. "12th century," he mutters. "13th century."

[Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

But all along they are looking for blindspots, low points, and ways over the wall.

[Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

The eventual—and final—method of escape is by way of diversion, using small flutes and makeshift drums to distract the castle guards as two prisoners make an improbable break for it down a handmade rope out of a tower. And, after a brief stop by a house in the Alps where a spot of romance pops up, they find their ultimate freedom in a moment that is absurd for all it reveals about the notion of political jurisdiction.

Running in plain view of German soldiers, who have finally caught up to them, our remaining two heroes have nothing to worry about: they have crossed an invisible line in the snow, making a mockery of all their tunnels and secret ropes, as they walk up a hill in neutral Switzerland.

[Images: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].

Clearly, outside the specific context of Breaking Out and Breaking In, there is much more to discuss, including the film's actual central theme, which is not escape but class divisions.

Hopefully, though, this will serve as a quick intro to the film's many specifically spatial propositions. If you had a chance to watch Grand Illusion last week, by all means let us all know what you think—and stay tuned in the next day or two for a post about Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped.

(Note: Friday, February 3, brings The Great Escape).

The non-adoption of location-tracking in the family

2012-02-01T03:29:41Z

“A Case Study of Non-Adoption: The Values of Location Tracking in the Family” by Vasalou, Oostveen and Joinson is a paper that is going to be presented in a week or so at the CSCW 2012 conference. It deals with the use of location-tracking by parents to monitor where their children are when outdoors. Based on a large- scale survey of 920 parents from the UK, the researchers show that this technology concurrently supports and threatens parental values.

A quick summary of the results:

“Families do not use location tracking: Only 1.7% parents reported using this technology with their children (implementation stage).
(…)
A significant number of parents, over one third of our participants, were not aware these technologies existed
(…)
Values are the motivating force in the adoption of location tracking: Our findings inform the technology adoption literature by showing that contrary to previous work, demographics (e.g. age and gender) did not predict adoption.
(…)
A small group of parents, 16%, were favorable toward location tracking (persuasion stage). Location tracking was seen as a tool to reduce uncertainty by providing constant information about children’s movements (uncertainty reduction category). More generally, parents’ accounts show that location tracking technologies are understood to be ‘preventive innovations’ that have the ability to reduce the risks facing children. Despite their positive attitudes, however, it is noteworthy that parents had not adopted these systems.
(…)
Parents do not need location tracking: The control provided via location tracking was considered to be a threat to self-direction and trust (trust and self direction category). Parents wanted to preserve their children’s ability to freely explore their environment without being judged“

And, interestingly, this last bit about declarative location (“checkin-in” in the Foursquare parlance) caught my attention:

“Systems that feature spontaneous location disclosure (e.g. checking-in) might be more reflective of this web of values and behaviors. By weakening the power relationship previously established through one-directional control, spontaneous location reports can give choice to children and nurture a sense of responsibility as well as honesty without stifling their freedom and autonomy“

Why do I blog this? Following the appropriation of location-based services, I am often surprised by the discourse that surrounds the use of such platforms. Articles such as this one, backed by data, are relevant in the sense that it shows the current usage and perspective in a specific context.

Architectural Nonessentials

2012-01-30T19:34:23Z

306090, under the guest editorship of David Hays, is seeking "possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge." Hays asks, "What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices, techniques, reference points, histories, and more—not presently considered essential to architecture could, or should, define its future?"

These are architectural nonessentials: unexpected sources of spatial counter-expertise that are "currently undervalued, generally misunderstood, or not yet recognized" (like, for instance, the peculiar architectural insights found in bank heists, the tactics of urban escape and evasion, or the tools of forced entry banned by California Penal Code 466-469).

Submissions are due March 30, 2012, and more info is available on the 306090 site.

(Via Alex Trevi).