Sunday, February 11, 2007

Warped Space

To be honest I found the reading quite hard to understand, I had to read it very slow and take notes on everything. I’m not sure if I got the point, I hope I did, but from what I read I understood that Anthony Vidler talks about this new tendencies of form, and vocabulary, influenced by technology that are conceived and manipulated in a virtual space. Basically what we are experimenting with in the class right now… blobs, folds,nurbs, etc etc. He calls them warped spaces and categorizes them as psychological and artistic.
This new forms result from the contemporary experimentations that continue analyzing what has been a concern since the turn of the century, the intersection of spatial with psychoanalytical thought, while “distorting the traditional space of modernism and questioning the equally traditional fiction of the humanist subject”. The two categories of warped spaces find common ground in the space of the city, and as a result from the representation or effort to solve the problems of city life emerges the need to develop new forms of expression.
As far as this goes I don’t think this is new, every single movement (yes, I do consider this as an emerging new movement) starts as a result of what is going on around us, it's the way we react to things that are happening at the time, either bad or good, things that we want to change or improve. Anyway this is not the main point. Vidler goes more into detail about this in the essay Death Cube "K" where he talks about the "Neoformations of Morphosis" (for the ones like me that didn't know what a neformation was: new and abnormal growth of tissue ) and devides all this new forms in 6 categories:Scapelands
landscape like forms), Men in Black (bureaucratic aesthetic albies), Morphing the Type (return to typollogies), Ellipses, Tipping the wall (spatiallity that refuses gravity) and the Burrow (space made with the earth and in the earth). He mentions Kafka's spaces a lot because his architectural and spatial formulations of modern life are relevant to the interpretation of Morphosis's recent urban and institutional projects.The essay concludes saying that Morphosis's neoformations begin to open up the territory of deterritorialization fro an architectural practice of global aspirations.
It's hard for me to have a real opinion about this text, I am still absorbing it and I wish I could find relations with other texts but this terms and theories are new for me, I'm still getting used to them.

Project 1b - Virtual Projection






This are the images I was trying to get last week but due to "technical problems" I couldn't. This images represent Jason's break dance movement. The different colors in the pictures show the right and left legs and the small gray shape represents one of the arms. The form is not accurate, after I constructed the nurbs I modified them so that they have more space in between. The images show one top (horiz. picture) and 2 side views.
If you click on th question mark you'll see the animation. As EVERYONE knows rendering the animation was pretty frustating, It ended up looking pretty good but there are some breaks close to the end of the animation because I was rendering it in 7 different computers and kept getting errors so I ended up missing a few seconds. The point of the project was to focus on the frame, what is surface and what is void and tried to obtain that by not showing the form as a whole by making the screen long and skiny and only showing you parts of the object as I move the camera around and inside it.