Lisa Gulesserian's blog

The Image of the City, Revisited: MIT’s Place Pulse Project

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

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).

As coined by Kevin Lynch, “imageability” is “that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment.” An “imageable” city is one that is readily identifiable by its landmarks and landscape. Connecting “imageability” to our daily lives, we make decisions on where to go if we’re unfamiliar with a city by judging what we see in the moment we see it.

East Austin Fence — Image Credit: karenjeanette's flickr

In their video, my students interviewed West Campus residents about their views on East Austin. Many of the interview subjects mentioned “chain-link fences” and “refuse” as they were describing East Austin. My students then asked their interviewees if they’d spent much time in East Austin—their answers were often phrased as “No, because it’s unsafe.” Seeing chain-link fences and trash was a deterrent for these West Campus students to venture across I-35 (no matter that the city’s most dangerous areas—in terms of the highest occurrence of murders, aggravated assaults, and rapes—aren’t even on the east side of town!).

Image Credit: Screenshot of Place Pulse

But are these visual cues universal? A group of researchers at MIT’s Macro Connections Group has made it their goal to find out with Place Pulse. The group describes the project as “an attempt to generate quantitative data on aspects of cities that are hard to quantify, such as the effect that urban looks have on our perception of a city’s safety or our own perceived level of prosperity. To answer these questions we crowdsource the comparison of pairs of images that show randomly chosen urban landscapes.” When you visit the site, you see two images side by side, then are asked questions like “Which place looks more safe?” or “Which place looks more touristy?” or “Which place looks more livable?” The site is meant to emulate our experiences in unfamiliar places. A chain-link fence on an unknown city street might make us vote for the other place as “more safe.” Or an outcropping of flowers in someone’s front lawn might make us deem it “more livable” than its partner picture. An initial visual cue affects our opinion of a place, and Place Pulse helps track what kinds of cues stimulate specific reactions in urban environments.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Place Pulse

The researchers at Place Pulse have been collecting visual cue data for a little less than a year now. They’ve even started to open up their data set (and their site’s visitors) to independent researchers around the world. Now, you can set up a question, along with the types and locations of Google Maps images, to get answered by anyone on the internet.

Image Credit: Corbo E. on yelp

I’m curious to see what would happen if I were to ask “Which place looks more safe?” for two images of Austin—one of the Drag in West Campus, one of East Sixth Street on the East Side. To those not as intimately familiar with the wonderful trailers, bars, and artists’ studios on Austin’s East Side, the chain-link fence might signal “danger.” To me, that same chain-link fence signals “a perfect place to lock my bike (if the bike racks are already full) while I eat beet fries at the Liberty Bar.” The images of a city are key, but so are our intimate experiences of a place. As Kevin Lynch says: “We are not simply observers of this spectacle [of the city], but are ourselves a part of it, on the stage with the other participants. Most often, our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all.” At first glance, “image is everything.” But with a closer look, it’s not the whole story.

Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal: Musings on Contradictions with the Harry Ransom Center’s Etched Window Façade

Lisa Gulesserian — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:29:43 +0000

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

Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal deals in visual contradictions. The title of Baudelaire’s poetry collection, often translated as “The Flowers of Evil,” immediately makes its main contradiction clear. Flowers are often associated with love, youth, spring, and vitality. Stereotypically, evil is tied to images that are often the opposite of themes associated with flowers. So, a beautiful flower that is simultaneously evil makes for a slight contradiction under typical visual tropes. Baudelaire’s evil flower (illustrated by Odilon Redon) has thistles that look like needles, a single razor-sharp leaf, and large black splotches. Yet, it’s still beautiful.

Image Credit: Library of Congress

The ominous flower in the Ransom Center’s façade brings a visual contradiction to the fore with its placement next to Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph from 1936, Migrant Mother, of a beautifully anxious woman in the Depression. Both images are beautiful, but there is something sinister lurking underneath, whether it’s the evil of the flowers or the worry of the migrant mother. And there are many images like Lange’s or Redon’s that are beautiful but depict something frightening, disgusting, or depressing.

Image Credit: Brown University Library Exhibits

Besides showing that visual images can play with contradictions, Baudelaire can also bring up another contradiction—that of the past in the present. In the portrait above by Georges Rochegrosse, Baudelaire is haunted by the past in the present. To Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire represents this contradiction in his very being. Benjamin is surprised by how the “‘Old-fashioned’ and ‘immemorial’ are still united in Baudelaire. The <things> that have gone out of fashion have become inexhaustible containers of memories.” The past is alive in Baudelaire’s life, and Benjamin explains that “It is very important that the modern, with Baudelaire, appear not only as the signature of an epoch but as an energy by which this epoch immediately transforms and appropriates antiquity.” It is here that Baudelaire represents a quality highly valued by Benjamin—the quality to view the world, with its objects and its people, through a different lens. Like the figure of the collector in The Arcades Project who sees treasures in the relics of the past, Baudelaire sees value in rethinking and reviewing the past in the present. Of course, as a place that houses many archives, the Ransom Center might be equally invested in bringing the past into the present. In using Baudelaire on their façade, the Center could be asking us to think about the contradictions of visual representation and archival work. I think that Walter Benjamin would have been proud.

An Art Deco King James in the Orientalist Vein: François-Louis Schmied’s Engravings of the Creation and Ruth Stories

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 17:08:36 +0000

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.

Art Deco was a remarkably successful and widespread architectural and artistic movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. The movement was one focused on decoration—the geometric, symmetrical forms of the buildings and drawings of the movement were influenced by ancient Egyptian flourishes. As Edward Said reminds us, since Napoleon’s foray into Egypt in the 18^th century, “Egypt was to become a department of French learning.” Along with Napoleon’s soldiers, “chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians” were tasked with “put[ting] Egypt into modern French.” Started around the heyday of archaeological work in Egypt (King Tut’s tomb was discovered in 1922), Art Deco internalized the general Egyptomania of the times. “Art Deco,” says British historian John M. MacKenzie in his book Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, “though not oriental in any obvious overall way, owed much to oriental influences: the geometrical patterns, often brightly coloured, the strongly projecting corbels, the sunbursts, winged elements, (like clocks rendered as solar discs), and other features.” Most of us are familiar with the architectural epitomes of this style, NYC’s Chrysler Building and Empire State Building. Both of these buildings make use of Egypt-inspired tropes, such as the lotus decorations on the elevators in the lobby of the Chrysler Building.

Image Credit: Archaeology.org

François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of the books of Genesis is no different when it comes to using Egypt-inspired visual elements. His depiction of the Creation is composed of brightly colored animals bursting (like sunrays) off the page. The whales spew water in symmetrical arcs, while a tidy group of partridges march along the bottom of the engraving.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Schmied was an Orientalist in the clearest sense. Working in the 1920s and 1930s, Schmied internalized the Egyptomania of his times. He even painted himself in “Oriental dress” at the beginning of his career in 1927. His willingness to take on the dress of the Other might be a sign of Schmied’s identification with the Orient of the past.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Shmied’s clear investment in the Orientalist project is critical to reading his illustration of the Book of Ruth. In his engraving for the marriage of Ruth and Boaz, Schmied chose to depict Boaz with darker skin than the outsider from Moab, Ruth. Moabites were excluded from the Jewish community as stipulated by God in Deuteronomy 23:3–6.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Ruth, as a Moabite, was allowed to congregate with Israelites because she was a woman (and Moabite women were begrudgingly accepted by Israelites). The story of Ruth and Boaz’s marriage is one of acceptance and compassion—Boaz marries the widowed and impoverished Ruth and fathers a son with her in the direct line of David and Jesus. Their story is not one of passionate love—nowhere does the Bible describe Ruth’s and Boaz’s physical attributes. So, it’s especially interesting that Schmied made Ruth into an olive-skinned beauty and Boaz into a dark-skinned savior. Schmied’s artistic choices might reflect his internalization of another culture, that of “the Orient.” In any case, his engraving is a unique one of an oft-depicted Biblical scene that merits much critical analysis.

See the engravings yourself at the Ransom Center’s exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The exhibition is up until the 29^th of July.

Art + Architecture: Fact and Fiction in The Buell Hypothesis

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

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: Experiments in Architecture and Research

As its creators—Buell Center colleagues Reinhold Martin, Leah Meisterlin, and Anna Kenoff—proudly proclaim in their preface to The Buell Hypothesis, the document is “both documentary and imaginary. It describes a world in which fiction informs fact just as much as fact informs fiction.” The structure of the Hypothesis reflects this collaborative process between the real and the fictional, as the document (interestingly described as “a screenplay” for “a film” by Martin et al. in their preface) is interspersed with such disparate elements as: descriptions of montaged images (of empty living rooms, of suburban houses) if the screenplay were to be made into a film; imagined dialogues between Socrates and Glaucon about the status of suburbs as they’re stuck in traffic on Interstate Highway 95 en route to a symposium organized by Diotima; clippings from real-world newspaper articles about public housing development and building policy since the New Deal Era; and case studies of a number of suburbs presented by Diotima in an imaginary PowerPoint presentation at an imaginary symposium.

Image Credit: Experiments in Architecture and Research

The ultimate goal of this hybrid between the real and the imaginary is to get readers of the Hypothesis—likely urban planners, architects, and even art curators—to rethink our preconceived notions and preconceptualized images of suburban development. Again Martin et al. use their preface to explain the goals of their project—“The Buell Hypothesis, at its most basic, is as follows: change the dream and you change the city. The single-family house, and the city or suburb in which it is situated, share a common destiny. Hence, change the narratives guiding suburban housing and the priorities they imply, including spatial arrangements, ownership patterns, the balance between public and private interests, and the mixtures of activities and services that any town or city entails, and you begin the process of redirecting suburban sprawl.”

Image Credit: Metropolis Mag

It’s interesting that the very form of the Hypothesis—with its genre-crossing use of various tropes from screenwriting, classic dialogue, PowerPoint presentations, and scrapbooking—informs the ultimate goal of the project. Martin et al.’s text asks us to rethink our beliefs about what scientific or architectural reports look like (we’re used to seeing drab reports, of the “Title/Abstract/ Introduction/Materials and Methods/Results/Discussion/Literature Cited” variety) with a baby-blue covered publication (one reviewer hilariously said that the Hypothesis “looks like it was retroactively leaked from the RAND Corporation in the 1960s”) full of both fact and fiction. In reimagining the report form to include dialogues and diversions, The Buell Hypothesis opens avenues for hybrid, user-centered projects to profoundly affect the future of urban planning and design.

The Hypothesis has already affected the real world with MoMA’s Foreclosed exhibition, an art/architecture exhibition which takes Diotima’s PowerPoint case studies of a few suburbs around the United States and imagines alternate futures for five of them. Read Foreclosed's inspiration, The Buell Hypothesis, in its entirety at the Buell Center’s site.

In Miniature: Bel Geddes’s “Doll House for Joan”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:25:05 +0000

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.

In the Ransom Center’s finding aid for the “Norman Bel Geddes Theater and Industrial Design Papers” housed at the Center, I found an interestingly domestic reference—one for a “Doll House for Joan.” In this helpful finding aid, I learned that Bel Geddes sketched and drafted the doll house just as he would any architectural or urban plan. Even elevations—though on a miniature scale—were noted! Bel Geddes made this detailed doll house for one of his two daughters, Joan, sometime in the early 1920s. I’m fascinated to see that before Bel Geddes decided to shift gears from stage design for theater and film, he tried out some of his nascent architectural skills with a miniature structure. I’d like to think that Bel Geddes’s ambitions to become an architect and planner were encased in his building a doll house.

Image Credit: Libraryland

Gaston Bachelard might agree with me. In The Poetics of Space (his magnum opus published in France in 1958), Bachelard muses about our relationships with “intimate places,” from childhood homes to closed drawers. His chapters weave poetry and personal experiences with dreams. The chapter most applicable to today’s discussion of Bel Geddes’s doll house is the one titled, simply, “Miniature.” In this chapter, Bachelard uses Poe and Rimbaud to discuss the power of miniatures in our everyday lives. The most wonderful thing about miniatures, according to Bachelard, is that “Values become engulfed in miniature, and miniature causes men to dream.” What’s important about miniatures isn’t their intricacy nor their accurate representation of reality. For Bachelard, “the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness . . . Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.” The ‘big’ (in terms of ideas, aspirations, and dreams) is encased in the ‘small’ (in terms of size, scale, and material).

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

I see glimmers of Bel Geddes’s future in his doll house from the 1920s. The structure is taller than it is wide (a nod to the tall skyscrapers in Bel Geddes’s future cities?). Its façade is clean and sparsely adorned (a design aesthetic made popular by Bel Geddes later in his career). And on its roof is a clothesline (as everything Bel Geddes designed was simultaneously fanciful and functional—see his designs of radios and restaurants). I’m tempted to believe, like Bachelard, that “when we examine images of immenseness, tiny and immense are compatible . . . If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing.” I see greatness in a doll house, domesticity in massive urban plans.

See the mini/immense doll house plans and accouterments yourself in the Harry Ransom Center’s archives now, or wait until September to see them in the Ransom Center’s Bel Geddes exhibition.

Art + Architecture: Diana Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:01:16 +0000

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: Sandy Carson (cropped)

Memory inspired the entire installation. Al-Hadid was stirred to create her sculpture “Suspended After Image” after seeing a Gothic painting of the Visitation which featured an intricate cloak. Working with twelve UT art assistants, Al-Hadid turned her memory of a two-dimensional painting into a three-dimensional structure. “Suspended After Image” has a certain sinuousness to it—a river of faux-fabric permanently flows over more than half of the sculpture. I’m tempted to think that the sumptuous river of cardboard, wood, plaster, and metal evokes the way that memory works. Much as fabric folds and rivers flow, we remember in spurts and starts. In a recent article on Al-Hadid’s installation at the VAC, Austin blogger Michael Graupmann reviews the artist’s creation process: “images she sees often get stuck in her mind, (‘made sacred’) and stay with her until she transforms them through her work.” The curvy form of Al-Hadid’s piece seems to mimic its creation process.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

And yet there is also a sharp jaggedness to the whole thing—paint globs create skyscraper-like structures that rise out of the ground. It’s safe to say that “Suspended After Image” is a work that mimics our built environment, as Al-Hadid’s creations often involve architectural tools and methods. For this particular piece, Al-Hadid used a 3D modeling program and CNC router to plan its structure. Intricate lattices and elaborate stairs need to be modeled, whether they are used for art or architecture.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson (cropped)

And behind every architectural design is a person. Al-Hadid’s sculpture doesn’t allow its viewers to forget the human element in architecture and art. While walking around the sculpture (which urges us to do so from multiple viewpoints, even from above in the VAC’s Mezzanine), we’re surprised that the artist planned for every angle to be seen by an ambulatory audience. The most surprising part of Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image” is the supple plaster body that is either disappearing into or emerging from the stairs at the bottom of the sculpture. Is the built environment oppressing this body into oblivion? Is it growing human loins? I’m unsure myself. But at least the human (in the sculpture and outside of it) isn’t forgotten.

See Diana Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image” yourself at the Visual Arts Center until March 10^th, when another Artist-in-Residence piece will take its place.

Future City from the Past: Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:31:56 +0000

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: a456

There’s a common theme in yesterday’s future city and today’s—the car. When last I spoke about possible future cities, I critically assessed artist Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II”, an installation where toy cars zipped across a future Los Angeles surrounded by huge strips of freeways. Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” is eerily similar to the future city Burden envisions. Both futures see unimpeded cars as the epitome of modern efficiency. And both images of the future are utterly devoid of people. Bel Geddes explains this lack by telling the readers of Life Magazine (where the “City of Tomorrow” ad campaign ran for months) that “tomorrow’s children won’t play in the streets.”

Image Credit: a456

Despite these similarities, there is a difference between Burden’s art installation and Bel Geddes’s advertising campaign, and this crucial difference is one of context. Burden created his art installation for public viewing at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA). Burden’s dealer Larry Gagosian footed the bill for Burden’s project, while LACMA board member Nicholas Bergguren later bought the project. The key point is that the stakeholders in the project’s success are art dealers and museum board members.

Image Credit: Best Ad

The stakeholders for Bel Geddes’s project’s success are a lot less innocuous. Shell Oil, one of the biggest petroleum distributors in the world, hired Bel Geddes for their massive, multi-segment advertising campaign. Looking at the elaborate advertisements, it’s obvious that Shell is using Bel Geddes’s designs to sell a future lifestyle that would make them millions (billions by today’s standards) if Americans decided to make it a reality. A transportation system dependent on cars would guarantee that gasoline would be a necessary commodity in the future. And it is exactly this gas-fueled future that was embraced wholeheartedly by the city planners of America in the decades following Shell’s campaign. Campaigns like Shell Oil’s “City of Tomorrow” lulled viewers into equating automobiles with ingenuity, modernity, and efficiency. Urban planners like Robert Moses and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright only realized what these viewers wanted to see: more roads, more highways, less impediments. Yet without artists and modelers like Bel Geddes to visualize a future of cars and people-less thoroughfares, what we have ended up seeing years down the line could have been a lot different.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

If the “City of Tomorrow” has piqued your interest, be sure to check out the Harry Ransom Center in the fall when their “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America” exhibition is up and running. Until then, visit the Ransom Center’s preview page for images and background related to the upcoming exhibition.

Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film: The Image of Vancouver in Battlestar Galactica

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

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.

What’s the image of Vancouver in Moore’s series? It is all glass surfaces, shimmering waves, soaring skyscrapers, geometric shapes, verdant shrubs. Light shines, unencumbered by opaque surfaces. Buildings blossom and are surrounded by trees threatening blooms. Everything is stripped clean of any identifying markings. A few CGI flourishes are added. This is the future city par excellence—unknown, yet slightly familiar.

Image Credit: "Daybreak Part 1" Screenshot

And that’s the way that future cities (of the real world variety) are supposed to work. They are simultaneously somewhere and nowhere. A recognizable Vancouver of today wouldn’t be a convincing future city—we’d be able to pick out landmarks and our disbelief would no longer be suspended. Does the fact that Moore used Vancouver as his setting for the future mean that Vancouver is devoid of landmarks? That it’s an amalgam of all cities?

Writer Douglas Coupland has waxed poetic about Vancouver in his book, City of Glass, and he’s not so sure that Vancouver is landmarkless. For Coupland, although Vancouver is Chinatown and Wreck Beach, it also is “Backlot North,” a cheap alternative for filming a variety of urban scenes no matter where they are supposed to be set. Vancouver has been Berkeley, Auckland, New York City, and now, Caprica City.

Imaginary/Filmed Vancouver Map Credit: Douglas Coupland

So, what does this malleability do for the image of Vancouver? After urban planner Kevin Lynch published his seminal book, The Image of the City, in 1960, “imageability” became a buzzword in planning circles all over the US. Every planner wondered what a city could do to create a unique image for its residents and for its outside audiences. David Harvey, a contemporary Marxist geographer, sees the end result of “imageability” as the production of cities for consumption (which eventually runs the risk of planners producing cookie-cutter cities that lose all uniqueness). Instead of losing all landmarks, with Moore’s use of Vancouver in Battlestar Galactica, Vancouver’s residents can see the image of their city more clearly.

Image Credit: Frak That

The image of Vancouver is remade as urban chroniclers traipse about the city looking for landmarks they saw in Moore’s version of the future. An entire website—Battlestar Locations—is dedicated to documenting Vancouver sites used when filming the series. The creators of the site, Anne and Mo, admit that they are “a couple of fans who like to travel and get together. Searching out locations has given [them] the chance to do both.” They often post side-by-side comparisons of the TV version of Vancouver with their own images of the same site. The images of Anne or Mo reenacting scenes while exploring their fine city are what “imageability” should be about—use. Yes, Vancouver is the “everycity” (Coupland, again) on film, but to its residents, it’s a magical place where the future comes to life.

Image Credit: Battlestar Locations

Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film: “Almost the Same, But Not Quite” Tokyo in Solaris

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

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.

In a scene that runs upwards of four minutes, Tarkovsky captures a “future” city where cars weave through fast-moving traffic along a multilane/multilevel highway. Tall buildings with dazzling billboards and glittering neon signs scroll alongside our moving vehicle. Eerie electronic notes punctuate a mostly silent drive. This scene might sound commonplace, especially for those of us familiar with the highways of Texas and California.

Los Angeles Freeway Interchange Image Credit: Stock Connection/World of Stock

But in the context of the film, it’s an unsettling drive through a future city (though the scene was filmed on Tokyo’s highways). According to the audio commentary on the Criterion Collection edition of Solaris, film critics Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie claim that Tarkovsky expressly asked for permission from the USSR to film in Japan. Although Tarkovsky’s original goal was to film the World’s Fair in Osaka (held in 1970), he was granted permission to leave for Japan in 1971 and ended up filming everyday traffic in Tokyo instead. Some critics (namely the New York Times’ Dan Kois) call the scene “the most boring” in the entire movie. Yet, to me, the scene feels anything but unnecessary and ordinary when taken in context. Even while watching the movie in the Austin of 2011, I was struck by how unsettled the scene made me feel. The extra-long takes, the startling electronic sounds, the unexpected cuts between color and black-and-white film all disoriented me.

Image credit: Screenshot from Solaris scene

I keep thinking that this scene is—per Homi Bhabha’s concept of “mimicry”—“almost the same, but not quite” the same as the highways I’m familiar with. And, I don’t think so just because I’m not used to seeing Japanese characters during interstate drives. Akira Kurosawa reads the scene with a “shudder.” To Kurosawa, “By a skillful use of mirrors, [Tarkovsky] turned flows of head lights and tail lamps of cars, multiplied and amplified, into a vintage image of the future city.” Given that the film’s protagonist, Kris Kelvin, uncannily finds someone (or something) rather like his dead wife, Hari, on Solaris, the theme of mimicry is Tarkovsky’s signature move for disorientation. Being thrown off kilter when we see Tokyo and Hari is exactly the point.

Mashups and Misreadings: “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume” Revisited

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

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.

According to Jorge Rivas' post on Colorlines, the Ohio University organization behind the campaign, STARS, created the images after the organization’s president, Sarah Williams, saw a person in black face at a Halloween party last year. To bring attention to the insensitivity of many Halloween costumes, Williams holds an image of a woman completely covered in black body paint, wearing a chain around her neck and a baseball cap on her head.

Image credit: STARS

The young woman points to her obviously false teeth (another key part of the costume) while a man wearing a vampire costume feigns going in for a bite on her neck. It’s all fun and games, right? Not to African Americans, like Williams herself, who are being mocked. Everything about the costume is a stereotype—the chain, the hat, the fake teeth. If we’re now “post-racial,” as some commentators have argued since the election of Barack Obama, this image seems like it’s out of time. In fact, it is. This is blackface no matter how hard we try to shrug it off. We see Williams’ serious face, and we know it’s not just a joke, a harmless costume. Her somber face and dark clothing contextualize the image she’s holding. We can’t help but agree with the words above the image: “This is NOT who I am, and this is NOT okay.”

Despite these visual cues as to how to read the campaign, some viewers seem to have taken Williams’ and STARS’ message lightly. On The Chive, “home to the best funny, viral and interesting photos from around the world,” the campaign is seen as a “FAIL.” In a post called “C’mon guys, let’s take Halloween seriously,” Mac the Intern collected 21 mashups of the campaign, using fictional characters, animals, and movie stars.

Images credit: The Chive

With these Photoshopped images, the tone and power of the original STARS campaign is completely ignored and, I would argue, diffused. Yes, it’s funny that people dress in dog costumes. But, when we see that this humor is pointed out using the exact format of the original campaign—the dark background, the orange “We’re a culture, not a costum” banner, the “This is NOT who I am, and this is NOT okay”—we only see the campaign and its creators suffering a fate similar to the one that they would suffer when seeing someone dressed up in a racist costume. Like the creators of the campaign who, embarrassed and ashamed, were forced to stifle their anger and hurt because they’re in a public setting, these images stifle the strong message of STARS’ campaign. We’re supposed to shrug it all off. Halloween’s a time of jokes and treats. But I can’t help but feel tricked.

So, as you’re thinking about roasting a turkey and falling into a contented slumber, know that we’re not done with Halloween yet. There are still all those Facebook Halloween pictures to look at.

Cities and Participatory Politics: Gary Hustwit’s Urbanized and You

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

All this talk about occupation has gotten me thinking about the role of cities in rebellions and revolutions. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan notes, “Place is a special kind of object. It is as concentration of value, though not a valued thing that can be handled or carried about easily; it is an object in which one can dwell.” When you “occupy,” you take possession of a value-laden place. As we’ve seen with the revolts all over the globe and in the US, places that are occupied by protestors are the ones that symbolize and galvanize. These places are often located in cities, which themselves are places of value par excellence. There’s a reason why cities and their respective places of value—their squares, their streets, their city halls—are the centers of political strife and communal anger. With the various scenes of metropolitan life in Gary Hustwit’s latest film, Urbanized (trailer above), we see that the city is not only as a place of aesthetic value, but a place of community engagement and public participation.

Image credit: Urbanized Film

The poster of Hustwit’s movie most clearly highlights the role of human involvement in urban areas. Hustwit, a self-proclaimed “design junkie,” made Urbanized as the third part in his “Design” trilogy, after the indie-hits Helvetica and Objectified. So, of course, design is key for Hustwit’s latest movie and for the movie’s poster. As Hustwit himself said in a talk about the movie in Austin last week, his trilogy’s progression went from small to large. The poster of Urbanized reflects the immensity of Hustwit’s project about urban spaces, and it reveals a message that is just as immense for urban residents. Yes, the poster shows all sorts of restrictions on the city-dweller (from signs like “Look Left, Look Right, Walk!” and “Caution,” to stock market crash arrows, to money signs reminding us that class is still king in the city). But the most prominent symbol in the poster is that of a walking person. Despite all the small things (literally, because they are so insignificant in size on the poster when compared to the walking person), city-dwellers can walk tall (literally, again, on the poster).

Hustwit’s walking tall happens only if citizens engage with their communities and with urban design. Like the discontented residents of cities all over America joining together to express their dissatisfaction, Urbanized is about showing the places of the city as up for debate.

Image credit: Screenshot from Urbanized Trailer

Hustwit spends some time documenting his favorite urban rebellions, from the small to the large. In New Orleans, artist Candy Chang puts up fill-in-the-blank stickers asking residents what they’d like to see show up in the place of ruined and abandoned businesses. In Stuttgart, more than 50,000 city residents protest the felling of trees that will rehabilitate the city’s outmoded train tracks and bring Stuttgart into the 21^st century. Chang’s art and the anti-Stuttgart 21 movement show that cities and their places are not written in stone.

Image credit: Screenshot from Urbanized Trailer

In Hustwit’s devoted depiction of these two movements along with other participatory political movements, we see that the artist can stick participatory art on the walls of decrepit buildings, the walker can cross the street, the protestor can occupy the center of town. The city’s a place of possibilities.

Hustwit’s film is dazzling, not only for its celebration of the aesthetic design of cities (his shots of Rio de Janeiro from above, with the favelas inching up the city’s mountains, will take your breath away; his interviews with big names from architecture and planning—like superstar architect Rem Koolhaas, Brasilia modernist architect Oscar Neimeyer, and former Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa—are illuminating), but for its celebration of the urban resident who resists and occupies the places of value that are threatened. See the film yourself and get inspired at one of the many screenings all over the US.

Don't Miss Your Chance--"El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:39:14 +0000

Image credit: The Blanton Musuem of Art

El Anatsui’s art is haunting. The shimmering bottle tops of his most recent pieces, meticulously netted and woven with the help of his young crew, speak of previous uses, prior intents, and pasts that pummel and prod. A retrospective exhibition of the Ghanaian artist’s 30-year career is currently on view at UT’s own Blanton Museum of Art. The exhibition, “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa,” is a wonderful investigation of the tangible ways that the past weaves itself into our present.

A few weekends ago, I roamed through the exhibition, utterly amazed and dazzled by Anatsui’s use of reclaimed and repurposed materials to make art that spoke of the history of the artist, his materials, and West Africa. One of the many standout pieces from the exhibition was Akua’s Surviving Children from 1996, which was constructed during Anatsui’s residency in Denmark.

Image credit: The October Gallery

Although Anatsui was invited to Denmark to commemorate the 200-year anniversary of Denmark’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, his Akua does more than just jubilantly praise the end of centuries of horror. His materials hint at a history of violence and oppression, as he uses driftwood from a Danish shore and nails from a foundry that used to manufacture the very guns that were used by Danes to round up slaves on the Gold Coast. The driftwood, slowly worn down by the waves, is reimagined as a group of marching people with fire-blackened faces; the nails, made at the very site that used to manufacture weapons that caused the subjugation of millions of Africans, have been reimagined as the glue that holds together the marchers. A shared past of subjugation and violence haunts the marchers who stand, defiant against all odds.

Instead of driftwood and nails, another standout piece from the exhibition, 2008’s Oasis, uses Anatsui’s signature technique of woven bottle tops from liquor bottles. The juxtaposition of the aesthetic value of a piece like Oasis (which really does feel like a drink of cool water) with the moral message (just how many liquor bottles were consumed for Anatsui to make his art?)—is staggering. As tangible representations of a community’s consumption, the liquor bottle tops—with names like “Liquor Headmaster”—are woven into a traditional art form from West Africa, cloth. The past is revisited (and possibly mourned?) through traditional weaving techniques using unconventional materials.

Image Credit: Jane Katcher / Peter Harholdt

But, as discussed in a recent talk between El Anatsui, curator Lisa Binder, and art historian Moyosore Okediji, Anatsui’s work isn’t just about mourning the past—it’s also about chance and movement. Anatsui’s bottle top weavings aren’t just social and political statements. They’re beautiful and freeform, too. The display of Anatsui’s art is left to the whims of museum curators, who choose to show us glimpses of the backs of the pieces, which often are as beautiful as the fronts. Anatsui’s work makes us gaze just a little longer; it makes us take a second look. His pieces are remade with our every glance. There is hope that the past, too, can be remade and reshaped just as the curators shape Anatsui’s art, which itself reclaims, by chance, materials that others had left for dead.

Don’t miss your chance to see “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa” in Austin. The exhibition is at the Blanton Museum of Art until 22 January 2012.

Critical Cartography: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Google Maps is a godsend—in our daily lives, we use the site to find a new place to live, track the settings of a public controversy, catch lawbreakers in the act, and claim land that’s been long-contested. Border scuffles and all, Google Maps is helping us reimagine the terrains, cities, and spaces of the real world. It was only a matter of time before we witnessed the melding of Google Maps virtual and Real World spatial. That time is now: Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl has spent the last five years working on a project that brings Google Maps’ digital location markers into real city spaces. His installations in different cities in Europe and Asia—all entitled “Map”—ask us to question the lines between real and virtual, center and periphery.

Known for his work with “Dead Drops,” the USB sticks that were installed in bricks of urban buildings to encourage free and anonymous sharing, Bartholl has long been toying with the false dichotomy between digitized and lived experience. His art is a reminder that digital environments have their own spatial representations, and that these spaces have ramifications in our lived lives.

With “Map,” Bartholl makes us question real and digital, center and periphery, through an installation involving a massive 600x350x35 cm wood sculpture of the iconic red location markers in Google Maps. With the help of a tow truck and a crane, the location marker was placed in the center of the city (two example locations for the installation were Taipei and Berlin).

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

From the pictures on Bartholl’s website, the markers are hard to distinguish from their digital counterparts. Both the digital markers and the “real” markers cast shadows. Both are perky punctuations in urban environments. Which of the markers is more real? Bartholl seems to nudge us in the direction of wondering whether this question matters anymore.

To further drive home how much effect Google Maps has on our ideas about places, Bartholl’s city center is the one that Google Maps provides when you search for the city. That center could be in an intersection, in a verdant wooded area, or in a dilapidated housing complex. Whatever the case, Bartholl’s installation asks us to question our ideas of center and periphery. What if your idea of the center of Berlin is different than the center of Berlin in Google Maps? What does the “center” of the city even mean in a digitized world?

Image credit: Aram Bartholl's "Map"

Bartholl’s work with the icons of Google Maps reminds us that maps are political productions. With maps, borders are drawn, districts are re-zoned, centers are marked. As geographers Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier argue in their “Introduction to Critical Cartography,” geographic knowledge is power, and hence, is political. With his cartographic installations, Aram Bartholl’s message is a political one; his work makes us rethink the boundaries that we have created when mapping digital and real, center and periphery, Google Maps or mental maps.

The (Future) Image of Los Angeles: Chris Burden's "Metropolis II"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

Los Angeles, the city we all (excluding Randy Newman) love to hate, is the inspiration for Chris Burden’s new kinetic sculpture, "Metropolis II," using 1,080 toy cars, many steep ramps, and a few powerful motors. The sculpture is expected to debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) this fall. Despite the sculpture’s not-yet-finished state, it’s already causing quite a buzz in the blogosphere, with coverage in the New York Times’ Wheels blog, LACMA’s Unframed blog, and GOOD Magazine’s Culture blog.

As a former Angeleno, the city and the ways that it’s depicted in art, film, and literary productions fascinate me. This fascination is well-documented by filmmaker Thom Andersen in his three-part video essay released in 2003, Los Angeles Play Itself.

Image credit: Bright Lights Film Journal

In Andersen’s movie, scenes from hundreds of movies traipse across the screen while a narrator laments the fact that Los Angeles has been maligned by the movies that are filmed and set in the city. According to Andersen, the city has been blown up and knocked down in film, if not completely evacuated of all the things that make it great—its pockets of diversity, its scruffy beauty, its simultaneously chaotic and laid-back lifestyle. By the end of Andersen’s epic on Los Angeles, we wholeheartedly agree with his musings about “Who knows the city?” For Andersen, and for fans of Los Angeles Plays Itself, the answer to this question is “Only those who walk, only those who ride the bus. Forget the mystical blatherings of Joan Didion and company about the automobile and the freeways. They say, nobody walks; they mean no rich white people like us walk. They claimed nobody takes the bus, until one day we all discovered that Los Angeles has the most crowded buses in the United States.” Being on the ground, in the streets, is what matters.

Chris Burden brings us the streets of a future Los Angeles with his “Metropolis II” kinetic sculpture. Burden’s metropolis has no discernable landmarks, no “A-ha! That’s Los Angeles!” buildings.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

But, there are a lot of freeways—in lanes sometimes 10 or more across, multicolored cars fly past. In a movie about the second Metropolis installation posted on the Gagosian Gallery’s YouTube page, Burden explains his reasoning for why he decided to make an installation where the toy cars never have to stop. As images of cars dart across the screen, Burden jokes that “I love hearing that the cars are going 230 miles an hour. That makes me really hopeful for the future. That’s about the speed they should be running. Not 23.4 miles an hour, which is what my BMW says I average driving around LA. It’s about to be over. The idea that a car runs free—those days are about to close. So, it’s a little bit like making a model of New York City at the turn of the last century and your model had horse buggies everywhere while automobiles are about to arrive. So, something else is about to arrive.” Burden’s “something else” are cars that don’t need people to guide them through the city, since there are no people that could get in the way of the self-sufficient cars.

The most striking feature for me while watching the movie about this installation is that there are no future people in this installation, no future pedestrians who can truly “know the city.” In “Metropolis II,” what we get is a people-less, car-overrun metropolis. The one image that stands out most for me is one of Burden (I presume) standing amidst the installation as it’s running, wearing headphones to dampen the incessant noise.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Metropolis II" on YouTube

I’m not exactly sure what to make of this image, but it seems to me to represent a conflict of interests with the Andersen/pedestrian camp and the Burden/car camp. This image has gotten me thinking about how Los Angeles is often depicted as a car-centric, post-modern configuration of sprawling neighborhoods. Isn’t it time that the city breaks out of this constricting stereotype?

Isn’t Thom Andersen trying to change our preconceived notions of Los Angeles with his movie? Isn’t that what the city’s recent strides to improve public transportation in the spread out metropolis is all about? Filmmaker Roman Polanski once famously said that “Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world...provided it’s seen by night and from a distance”; it seems that, with Burden, Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world…provided it’s devoid of people to impede the city’s cars from going as fast as they can. The important question to ask is: Does Burden’s image of Los Angeles do anything to change our minds about the city people love to hate?

Echotone: A Portrait of the Genre-Crossing Documentary Through Its Panoptic and Street-Level Lenses

Lisa Gulesserian — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:40:14 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, Echotone trailer on YouTube

Hello, viz. readers! I’m Lisa, and I’m new to the blog. You’ll notice as you read my posts that I’ve got my favorite themes: cities and urban culture, genre-crossing productions (of the filmic and literary variety), and the global south.

My post today, on last year’s documentary film Echotone, concerns two of my three interests—I’ll leave it to you to figure out which of my interests apply.

The movie, made in 2010 by director Nathan Christ, is a self-described “cultural portrait of the modern American city examined through the lyrics and lens of its creative class.” Our fine blog’s hometown, Austin, Texas, is the American city under scrutiny in the film.

Throughout Echotone, the viewer is transported to staggering heights above the city. In fact, the opening shot pans across the skyline, documenting construction projects that dot the landscape of downtown Austin. Tethered to a crane, the camera sees the city in a panoptic—some might say voyeuristic, especially because of the evening/early morning light—way. With soft shadows and glimmering waters, there’s a beauty in seeing the city from above, removed from its day-to-day scuffles and scraps.

Image credit: Screenshot, Echotone trailer on YouTube

In truth, French theorist Michel de Certeau reminds us of this scopic pleasure in his famous chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life entitled “Walking in the City”: being atop the city’s highest structure and looking down at its beautiful totality transforms the mundane city into “a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a God.” When we can contain the totality of the city in one image, one visage, we are empowered.

So, then, why would we leave such great heights (for, of course, Echotone must move to documenting what happens in the streets, the bars, the garages of Austin to get to the heart of the city’s “creative class”)? Why, per de Certeau, should we “fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth”? Let’s follow de Certeau into the darkness: “The panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.” No overhead view of the city will show us its stories, its intricacies, its residents. So, we descend the heights (as we do in all movies about cities) into the murky streets and alleyways of the complex city.

Image credit: Screenshot, Echotone trailer on YouTube

And we do so with Echotone—we see a kitchen full of mattresses while an indie pop band records an album, we see a garage full of unsold CDs while the film’s producer explains why he promotes bands (it’s for the love of music), and we see a street full of tired and wired music-lovers during the city’s annual South by Southwest music festival. We see all these things in Echotone because a movie about a city can never be filmed only from on high.

The question is, why does Echotone switch between panoptic and street-level views as the movie progresses? We see everything on the ground through the “lens of [the city’s] creative class,” along with panning shots of the city from above, because Echotone is a tricky kind of movie. Part documentary, part moralizing tale about the problems that musicians face in the self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World,” the film moves between the panoptic view of the city’s developers and the familiar views of its hardworking musicians. Like de Certeau’s pedestrian in the city that moves such that no panoptic power can know exactly what they’re doing at any given moment, the film strives to shake up our notions of the idyllic “music capital” by disorienting us with hypnotic sequences of the city from above. Of course, we know from the emotional value invested in the scenes with Austin bands (like Belaire who worry about “selling out,” like Sunset who worry about selling out again, and like Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears who worry about being “broke”) where the true loyalties of the film lie—in the streets with Austin’s musicians.

To see the city of Austin in a movie theater near you through both panoptic and street-level lenses, visit Echotone’s “Events” page.