viz. - Academics/Artists

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.

Mapping and Problematizing Digital Humanities Collaboration

Elijah Meeks — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

The documentation, representation and analysis of academic networks has a long tradition with, for instance, citation networks having been well-examined. Even here at Stanford, the focus on studying academic collaboration, interdisciplinarity, citation and "the dynamics of knowledge creation" by projects like the Knowledge Creation Lab have led to research and interactive software like the Dissertation Browser, which allows for an exploration of the topic networks formed out of the texts of various dissertations. In my own experience, however, describing the Wild West of Digital Humanities projects, groups, institutes, centers, collaboraties and informal teams is not so easy as downloading and reconciling authors and citations from a friendly and metadata rich on-line journal or aggregator, nor is it deeply embedded enough in network theory to easily sidestep the practical concerns that it evokes. Describing the projects and participants in the Digital Humanities at Stanford using semantic links has produced enormously interesting, as well as enormously problematic, results.

I would wager that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was, for many, the first exposure to the power of networks. Its namesake, Six Degrees of Separation, was a play that seemed also revelatory of the power and scope of networks. The popularity of mapping relationships, whether social or professional, continues to grow, and toolsets like Pajek, Gephi and Cytoscape make the creation, representation and analysis of these networks seductively easy. Last year at Stanford I decided to map out the projects and collaboration that fell under my own broad definition of the Digital Humanities. The DH@Stanford Graph has grown ever since, and now consists of over 450 nodes (which can represent individuals, groups or objects) and over 600 edges (the semantic links between nodes). Visually, it can be quite impressive.

My preferred network analytical pack, Gephi, not only allows for a variety of representations and the typical analyses, but also outputs to the various graph standards so that the resulting networks can be visualized or traversed using common web technologies. I prefer Flash for its performance, but the ideological among us can also use JIT or ProtoVis and provide a traversible graph of their network of friends or, in this case, academic collaboration.

It's all so easy and beautiful and problematic. I began to build the DH@Stanford graph so that I could better understand network principles--after all, it would be easier for me to understand betweenness centrality when the rating was applied to people and groups in a network that I was embedded in than it would to understand such concepts when applied to English authors, european intellectuals, Enlightenment tourist traps or species databases. The simple idea of semantically describing the links between people and groups at Stanford quickly ran aground. After all, we could easily describe a project involving three faculty:

And there we have it, everyone "connected" to a project. But the irony inherent in the play Six Degrees of Separation was that even though we were all connected through a chain of people who knew each other, it turned out we didn't really "know" even that first degree of our social network. A graph of friends on Facebook ignores the variety of social relationships one may occupy (are you a real friend, a "facebook friend", or just someone that I approved because my account was new and I wanted to increase the size of my group?). Collaboration in academia is no less complicated.

Semantic links are extremely useful in building networks but, despite how we may cringe at the thought of metrics, we have to categorize and weigh connections for the analysis and representation of these networks to have any real value. Likewise, making these graphs explicit emphasizes the need to track the objects that have been created through these projects and by these collaborators. While we may dislike the idea of tracking academic production, every cv is a list of connections, just as like every 'About' page on every project.

For the Map of Collaboration and Digital Innovation at Stanford, it is also fundamentally important that different stakeholders be allowed to evaluate these connections and products differently to reflect their view of academic production. You may think that blog posts are not academically important, and thus drop their value to 0 on your graph (or remove those nodes and edges), while another scholar may treat software tools as more worthwhile than peer-reviewed journal articles. The results of such distinctions will allow for different topologies of the same map, and make explicit competing views of modern scholarship.

You may have noticed that I didn't call it the DH@Stanford Graph, but instead the Map of Collaboration and Digital Innovation at Stanford. I've always used a broad definition of the Digital Humanities but the term so frustrates certain stakeholders that, despite being the Digital Humanities Specialist at Stanford, I'm happy to step away from it in the production of a resource such as this. I began building this map for practical reasons--to learn how to deal with network data--and I've continued to build it for practical reasons surrounding large collaborative projects that integrate traditional humanities scholarship with digital tools and methods. Regardless of what we call this field or community or movement, it is occuring and its occurence can be mapped and measured and possibly made more efficient.

I enjoy the problematic nature of creating and representing these networks, and I hope to have developed a few more problems and a few more networks with which to entertain participants at DH11 this year, where I'll be presenting as part of the panel Modeling Event-Based Historical Narratives: A Conversation Between Digital Humanists, Information Scientists and Computer Scientists. It is my hope that by the time the conference comes around, we may have a few university networks that we could look at, with which to spur discussion about collaboration itself, as well as the challenges of documentation and representation of collaboration.

Julian Voss-Andreae: Science in Fine Art

Anne Bobroff-Hajal — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:06:41 +0000

Julian Voss-Andreae earned a Masters in quantum physics at the University of Vienna, participating in a seminal experiment demonstrating quantum behavior for buckminsterfullerenes. He then left academia to become a full-time sculptor in order to express his powerful artistic response to the scientific phenomena he'd been immersed in.

One of Voss-Andreae's best-known works is "Quantum Man," which, seen from front or back appears to be solid. Seen from the side, it almost disappears. Quantum Man represents quantum physics, which, Voss-Andreae explains, reveals that electrons are not discrete points, but "fuzzy." In the quantum world, "things ultimately do not have a hard edge or some sort of well-defined boundary where one thing ends and another one starts." The Quantum Man sculpture's vertical metal sheets represent the fact that, according to quantum physics, particles in motion have "the features of a moving wave with wave fronts running perpendicular to the direction of its motion." Quantum Man's startling disappearing act as the viewer shifts perspective symbolizes "the dual nature of matter with the appearance of classical reality on the surface and cloudy quantum behavior underneath." (Voss-Andreae's article, Towards Quantum Sculpture, is available on his website.)

Quantum Man is a bit atypical for Voss-Andreae, in that most of his work portrays the infinitesimal: molecules such as protein chains, and subatomic scenes.

So like other artists Eileen has discussed on viz. such as Luke Jerram, Voss-Andreae makes microscopic natural phenomena visible to the human eye by enlarging them, and also by building them in materials and forms that capture our imagination. Voss-Andreae has set himself an admirable but difficult goal. We can easily recognize Jerram's microbe sculptures as life forms. Voss-Andreae, on the other hand, portrays molecules and subatomic phenomena that most of us cannot immediately recognize as such, and understand little even with explanation.

Voss-Andreae has provided explanation of his visual vocabulary in interviews and his own writing, enough for any student of visual rhetoric to explore. What interests me more here, though, is his writing about his general goals: his sculptures, he wrote in an article in Leonardo, "offer a sensual experience of a world that is usually accessible only through the intellect." Elsewhere, he says

"I am not after some kind of intellectual understanding. I want to make work that appeals foremost to the senses and is ideally intuitively recognized as meaningful. The conscious thoughts come after that.... Having an intriguing sculpture in combination with the most basic knowledge like 'this is shaped after something in your body that makes you live' can get people thinking about deep questions, such as 'what does it mean to be alive?' or 'what is left of me if I subtract my biochemistry?'"

It reminds me of what Eileen wrote about the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel's fabulous drawings, which

give us “new images” of the natural world through a complex mode of artistic, mystical, and scientific vision, generating what I’ll call a visual biology of the strange....
Despite their problematic status as scientific illustration, these images make visible an eerie vitality that connects organic life. Their artistry invokes a feeling in the viewer akin to a science-fictional alterity: these images are both familiar and strange, hence their power to alter our vision.

Voss-Andreae has also written about the occasionally negative response he gets to the idea of portraying an - to others - estoteric world which he experiences viscerally and esthetically. "Many artists," he says seem strongly resent anything "scientific or technological.... Unfortunately, the divide many of us create between intellect and emotion, body and spirit, or art and science, is so far internalized that it actually blocks some of us from recognizing the sublime in nature if it happens to be scientifically obtained." I resonate with this because I, too, am striving to create art that expresses my own powerful emotional and visual response to "esoteric" research (in Russian history). I've had a similar struggle, often feeling I live between two worlds, not belonging fully to either. But why should this be? As Voss-Andreae remarks, the Renaissance - which we look back on as a peak of human endeavor and achievement - was all about the merging of new developments in science and art.