viz.

Image Credit: MIT's Macro Connections Group

Last week, as my students in my Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums class presented their final movie projects, I was reminded of how we often judge a place after only a cursory glance. One group project especially got me thinking: “The Divide,” a student-made film that explored the differences between East and West Austin, included many images from East and West Austin along with candid interviews of residents from both sides of the divide. My students’ video reminded me of MIT’s Place Pulse project, which in turn reminded me of Kevin Lynch’s seminal urban planning book from 1960, The Image of the City. As a culmination of my time blogging about cities the last few months on viz., I’m going to talk about “imageability” and intimacy in Austin (and beyond).

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Two images related to one of the most respected French poets of the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire, grace the Harry Ransom Center’s etched glass façade. Yes, the images of a disturbingly beautiful flower bud and a similarly ominous bouquet on the cover for Baudelaire’s 1857’s collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal, are on the Ransom Center’s south and north windows because the Center has holdings of Baudelaire’s work in their French Literature collection. But, maybe the Ransom Center’s choice to use Baudelaire twice when there are many other French authors they could have chosen to represent leads us to another reason why Baudelaire is so prominently represented in the Center’s public face. Baudelaire has always been a dialectical figure of contradiction—twentieth-century literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin found in Baudelaire the linchpin around which he could situate the conundrum of urbanity in the nineteenth century. In Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project (compiled between 1927-1940), Benjamin muses that the “uninterrupted resonance which Les Fleurs du mal has found up through the present day is linked to a certain aspect of the urban scene, one that came to light only with the city’s entry into poetry. It is the aspect least of all expected. What makes itself felt through the evocation of Paris in Baudelaire’s verse is the infirmity and decrepitude of a great city.” The contradictions of the metropolis—the high and the low, the beautiful and the grotesque—are everywhere in Les Fleurs du mal. Like Benjamin, the Ransom Center uses Baudelaire in their window façade as one figure through which we can view the many contradictions of visual representation and archival work.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Just before viz. took a break for spring, we visited the Harry Ransom Center’s newest exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. Instead of finding only illuminated manuscripts, we were surprised to find contemporary art, literary manuscripts, film posters, and even a sculpture of a golden calf. The exhibition is not just a collection of well-preserved historic Bibles—it’s a unique collection of visual artifacts tangentially related to the King James Bible. As the viz. team walked around the exhibition, one grouping of images caught my eye. Art Deco engraver François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of both Genesis and The Book of Ruth from the King James Bible is absolutely stunning. The artwork is most interesting for its fusion of the geometric lines of Art Deco with the Orientalism of its creator and the lyricism of the Biblical stories it illustrates.

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

A few days ago, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) unveiled its newest exhibition, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. A collection of five architectural plans that reimagine how five different suburbs in America could have benefitted significantly from Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, Foreclosed is an amazing exhibition that melds art and architecture, politics and place. Today, I’m going to discuss the impetus of this exhibition—The Buell Hypothesis. The Hypothesis is an amazing hybrid publication created by Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. According to the publication’s graphic designers, The Buell Hypothesis is “part socratic dialogue, part contemporary screenplay, part media scape and part power point slide presentation.” This hybrid production, with its emphasis on collaboration and reinterpretation, is an appropriate point of genesis for Foreclosed. 

Image Credit: SliceofGreen

In anticipation of the Harry Ransom Center’s upcoming exhibition of Norman Bel Geddes’s futuristic designs, I’ve become completely fascinated with the work of a man whom the Ransom Center describes as “an innovative stage and industrial designer, futurist, and urban planner who, more than any designer of his era, created and promoted a dynamic vision of the future—streamlined, technocratic, and optimistic.” This week, instead of focusing on the futurescapes of Bel Geddes after 1927 (the year Bel Geddes launched his industrial-design career), I will discuss a lesser-known Bel Geddes—the man as a father who built fantastic doll houses for his daughters. This man was a big dreamer (per French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whom we’ll meet later in this post), one who dealt in miniatures.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

For those of us interested in architectural sculpture, the last few months in Austin (especially on the UT campus) have felt like gifts from the art gods. I’ve already written about one exhibition (the recently-closed El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa show at the Blanton Museum of Art). This month ushered in a second sculptural exhibition. New York sculptor Diana Al-Hadid’s Suspended After Image, a site-specific installation at UT’s Visual Arts Center’s Vaulted Gallery, is a feat of texture and height. As a fantastic example of architectural art, Al-Hadid’s most recent work for the VAC asks viewers to circumambulate the sculpture and ponder the relationship between memory, built objects, and humanity.

Image Credit: a456

I’ve been thinking a lot about future cities these days, though I’ve mostly been focusing on real-world metropolises as futuristic settings in TV shows and movies. Today, I’m going to shift gears to describe an idea for a future city from the past, Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” advertising campaign for Shell Oil from the late 1930s. The campaign predicts (critics might say “encouraged” or “enabled”) a car-centric, highway-laden, city whose residents “loaf along at 50 [m.p.h]—right through town.” Bel Geddes’ “tomorrow” continues to resound today.

Image Credit: Pat Suwalski

To continue my discussion of real cities represented as futurescapes on film, this week I’ll be talking about the much-loved sci-fi TV series Battlestar Galactica. The series, a “reboot” of the less critically-acclaimed series of the same name from 1978, was filmed and aired from 2003 to 2009. Instead of solely relying on special effects to create a future city called Caprica in the show, the series’ creator, Ronald D. Moore, decided to use a real-life glittering city on a bay. In Battlestar Galactica, Vancouver is the future. And the future is now.

I just watched Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. The movie’s a whirlwind of mourning, longing, and technologizing. I won’t talk much about the plot here. Instead, I’ll talk about a scene, amongst many, that caught my attention. This scene, in the distant, fuzzy future of the movie’s setting, places us in the passenger seat of a self-propelled car on an impossibly busy highway. In Tokyo, Japan. In 1971. Like Solaris, many TV shows and movies have made use of present-day, real world metropolises to conjure up imagined future cities. In this first segment of a series called “Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film,” Tokyo in Solaris is “almost the same, but not quite” what we’re used to seeing. 

Image credit: STARS

I know that we just survived another Halloween, so you’re probably already on to thinking about your Thanksgiving plans. Humor me as I ask us to think about Halloween again. While perusing Colorlines, a daily news site about contemporary racial justice issues, I stumbled upon a fantastic visual campaign by Ohio University’s Students Teaching about Racism in Society (STARS) organization. The campaign, “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume,” is smart, scathing, and to the point. It’s everything I ever wanted in a campaign to raise awareness about the everyday racism that is often shrugged off in moments of embarrassment and frustration. As expected, the campaign has garnered national attention, but its message has been mocked by mashups posted all over the Internet. We need to think critically about the messages about racism in both STARS’ campaign and in its Photoshopped reiterations. Something’s askew in the mashup world, if you ask me.