socks-studio

Back to Socks from Rome and the lecture!

We remember, from our time as students at the architecture school, a typical lecture in “Descriptive Geometry”, on the perspective restitution of Velazquez’s “Las Meniñas“.  From the supposed, (historically established), height of a single stair’s step we were able to derive a whole plan and section with the proper positions of the characters and the real point of view of the scene. The science of representation was in a mutual dialogue with artistic historiography.

Lately a lot of collective effort has been focused on the reconstruction of the scenario of Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, bringing to light the architecture behind the hidden secrets of a demanding plot.

Marialuisa Pacini was able to build a set model for a an adaptation of the drama in modern London.

Jeff Desom used modern video editing tools for dissecting the film and stitching back together. What he obtained was a single panoramic view of the entire backyard.

Here’s the video and some scene of his READ WINDOW Loop 2011 installation:

The “Wrong House, The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock” provides a plan and section of the Jeffries apartment complex:

Things Magazine, from which this post is inspired, informs us that this movie features “diegetic cinematography”. This is the case of movies whose denotative narrative material does not include only the narration itself , but also the fictional space and time dimension implied by the narrative. See Wikipedia.

Rhizome.org voice on “diegetic cinematography” features an analisys of the recent movie Chronicle and opens the speculation to uncharted territories, questioning the relationship between truth and representation, violence and entertainment : “Unlike Carrie, which was made for a generation that grew up watching the Vietnam War unfold in one hour nightly episodes,  Chronicle was made by, and for, the generation who was sitting in home room when the World Trade Center was attacked. And more than the content, the way Chronicle was filmed reflects psycho-social terror of that experience.”

From “Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle“, 1967 Jean-Luc Godard)

Excerpts from Wikipedia:
The film does not tell a story so much as a present an essay-like study of Godard’s view of contemporary life; Godard wrote that “I wanted to include everything: sports, politics, even groceries. Everything should be put in a film.

Around the time he was making the film, Godard appeared on the television program Zoom to debate with government official Jean St. Geours, who predicted that advertising would increase as the basic impulse of the French society at the time was to increase its standard of living. Godard explained that he saw advertisers as the pimps who enslave the women to the point where they give their bodies without compunction because they’ve been convinced what they can buy has more potential to bring happiness than enjoying sex in a loving way.

The poster for the upcoming 104 exhibition: “A voir et à manger – festival des arts culinaires” is curiously similar to Sam Smith’s poster design for Fassbinder’s Sci-Fi picture Welt am Draht (Criterion US version)…

Apart from being the world leading engineering consultants, Arup amuses itself creating spectacular computer simulations of possible explosive plots.
The digital atemporality of computer simulacra allows Arup to employ the same sophisticated analysis and rendering techniques both to investigate and predict the consequences of possible terrorist attacks and to reconstruct ancient historical scenarios.

To mark the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes‘ (the guy that inspired V For Vendetta and the relative masks, alright?) attempted Gunpowder Plot against the UK Houses of Parliament, a television programme was commissioned.

“Guy Fawkes attempted to kill King James I and almost every influential person in the land. He was captured directly below Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder and a slow-burning fuse. Since then, historians have speculated about the results if Fawkes had not been prevented from setting off the gunpowder.”

Here’s the verdict:

“A reconstruction of the 1605 building was stocked with mannequins before the bomb, made up of the same quantity of gunpowder as Fawkes’s 36 barrels, was detonated.
Both the analysis work and the spectacular reconstruction of the explosion proved that Fawkes’ plan would have had devastating consequences for anyone present in the Houses of Parliament that day.
Any of the physical effects of the explosion, such as direct blast pressure, heat, impact of high-speed timber fragments and the impact of falling back to earth could also have killed many, if not all, of those present. But the extreme upward thrust would have been the primary cause of death.
The power of the explosion would have been heard at least five miles away and seen from many more. The blast would have been directed mostly upwards, raining debris in a 200m radius.”

Via: Things Magazine

Alessandro Bavari is an animation and painting artist living and working in italy.

METACHAOS is a multidisciplinary audio-visual project, articulated in a short film, a set of photography and mix-technique paintings. The purpose of the project is to represent the most tragic aspects of the human nature and of its motion, such as war, madness, social change and hate.

This work recently won the prestigious Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica 2011.

At the end of the images you can find the synopsys and the statement of the video, along with the Ars Electronica Jury Statement.

alessandrobavari.com/
info@alessandrobavari.com

SINOPSYS
Metachaos, from Greek Meta (beyond) and Chaos (the abyss where the eternally-formless state of the universe hides), indicates a primordial shape of ameba, which lacks in precise morphology, and it is characterized by mutation and mitosis.
In fact the bodies represented in METACHAOS, even though they are characterized by an apparently anthropomorphous appearance, in reality they are without identity and conscience. They exist confined in a spaceless and timeless state, an hostile and decadent hyperuranium where a fortress, in perpetual movement, dominates the landscape in defense of a supercelestial, harmonic but fragile parallel dimension. In its destructive instinct of violating the dimensional limbo, the mutant horde penetrates the intimacy of the fortress, laying siege like a virus. Similar to the balance of a philological continuum in human species, bringing the status of things back to the primordial broth.

While some of as did not necessarily share the apocalyptic view of this film, we found that it left the most indelible impression. Narrowly passing through the first round, it grew on us, so that on repeated viewing it miraculously made its way to the top.
What starts as a cinematic, kinetik, yet clean field of geometry and bodies, gradually evolves, or devolves, into the artist’s vision of a nightmarish black-and-white world created by a continual collision of the human and the architectural form. It finally culminates in a screaming dance among the ruins. In a impressive virtuoso tour de force, Alessandro Bavari creates a constant mêlée of grime, projectile muck and dust among collapsing spaces at the stage for metamorphosing human bodies with branching limbs that seem constantly to break the architectural environment apart. Zombies with missing limb sand decaying skin and faces sometimes stand around listlessly and other times appear to engage in orgasmic sex. The human forms become insect-like and multiply in hordes across the building forms. Dust particles and snakes of turbolent, ferrous liquid finally explode into an apocalyptic ocean of flotsam and sludge.
Bavari’s few collaborators helped shape what the credit call “camera tremula” (shaky, documentary-style camera) and sound design. We commend his dedication to a singular artistic vision that is grounded in his practice as a photographer. This is a representation of a caustic end of the world, a world of a audible pain and hopeless destruction rendered with a disturbing reference to 80s-style computer-generated animation as well as 60s “actionism”.