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: 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: 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.

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.

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.