viz. - city

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.

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.

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.