Event-Scape Cinema - sensory mappings

Professor: Brooks T. Atwood

PROPOSAL
To further continue with and push past the idea of “urban spectacle” of the “neglected and infected moments in the city,” I’d like to have the students produce a series of sensory maps and cinematic experiences to not only engage the city but to redefine the ‘city’ as ‘global brain.’
These sensory maps would address new ways to engage with the city (i.e. physically, mentally, memory, time-based, texture, dancing etc).

Society can be viewed as a multicellular (not multi-cultural) organism, with individuals in the role of the cells. The network of communication channels connecting individuals then plays the role of a nervous system for this superorganism, i.e. a "global brain".

The theory of Meta-Morphology introduces the concept of process patterns. The purely metaphysical concept of Virilio's event-landscapes is transformed into practical graphical representations of process patterns to create a new “Event-Scape Architecture” as described by Dr. Andreas Goppold.

These investigation would allow for the creation of sensory based cinematic event-scape architectures (in other words, the students will have to engage, see and think to discover relationships between the physical self and their environment in the past, present and future time-spaces).

*Possible scenarios…for the students (Drift Cinema v2.0)

Below represents some possible assignments and simulations. These would be further refined to deal specifically with the city of Siena and the given timeframe for the project.

STEP ONE: CARTOGRAPHY AND AGENT/NODE simulation
Pick several films (or sequence studies). Identify 3-4 key agents in the film you are studying. Study and model the core attributes of these agents. Build an abstract model of the basic ‘cell’ structure, event and program unit. Prepare to use this model to develop a local and global parti for the project.

Using the Map(s) and Ciné Moment(s) of the narrative event, reenact the event on a site/situation in the city, at one to one scale in real time. Use your Map/Ciné as an instruction set to engage the city. Record this reenactment, using cameras, drawings and text, creating a set of field documents. Precedents here include Sophie Calle’s work, Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts and the Situationist Derive strategy.

“One must also remember that the surface of the territory is mobile and fluid as it is given to the continual distortions of memory.”
Cache, Earth Moves

STEP TWO: AGENT DESIGN
Reverse engineer the initial work studying memory, agent systems, maps and diagrams and design a sub component of your “archive project” (to be determined): characters, events, trajectory across space, the structure, the interface, the network, the cells, etc.

Projects will be conducted by students according to protocols and rules drawn from an array of possible ‘urban encounters’. Teams will ‘reenact’ and ‘transcribe’ these episodes and document them through the use of photographs, video cameras, Polaroid cameras, sketches, watercolors, tattoos, wigs, physical models, etc (think ‘Memento’) Everything should be documented and recorded with notes and labels. The documentation will be analyzed and reprocessed to create a new cartography of the urban landscape. The final result of each students’s work will be a set of storyboards, scripts, and a set of 2D and 3D maps of the city.

image from Bande à part (1964) by Jean-Luc Godard - dancing scene in the cafe