Friday, January 1, 2010

Representing Motion

Picking up on the thread of Transect Representation, I recalled that Urban Tick had recently posted a graphic from 'The View from the Road' (Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard et al., MIT press, Boston, 1964) - one that I hadn't previously heard of and sounds somewhat applicable to the idea of representational strategies for movement.


:: image via Ephemeral Landscape in the page

The post linked to a longer related post called 'Ephemeral Landscape: in the page' with some additional imagery and a long tangents that include storyboarding and graphic novels to name a few themes. A snippet from the text of Lynch & Appleyard begins to make this link between representation and experience: "The sense of spatial sequence is like that of large-scale architecture; the continuity and insistent temporal fl ow are akin to music and cinema. The kinaesthetic sensations are like those of the dance or the amusement park, although rarely so violent.”

This alludes to the idea of my continual exploration of 'Soundtrack of Spaces' where the sequence can be somewhat choreographed within a design concept. The idea of representation of temporal processes is fascinating, as it's a two-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional process - making it a quite a representational leap. A diagram of t'ai-chi footwork captures the essence of this notational form.


:: image via Ephemeral Landscape in the page

This notation reminds me of the very specifically of Lawrence Halprin's concepts of 'motation' that fused the representational techniques of movement and notation derived from a system of graphically representating dance steps. It's difficult to find many good images of this system to describe it fully, but here's a couple of images from a fascinating study I found from a early 1970s thesis from MIT on "Notation Systems in Architecture" which uses Halprins system of Notation as well as the methods from 'A View From the Road'.






:: images via 'Notation Systems in Architecture' by Premjit Talwar

For architecture, the concepts are broken into four ways of describing environments. These include 1) motion channels, 2) orientation, 3) anatomy of visual space, and 4) form quality. These work in tandem to provide a framework for symbol-based diagramming of spaces that include movement and use (sort of captured in the following two images).




:: images via 'Notation Systems in Architecture' by Premjit Talwar

The scores from Halprin, et.al. cannot be immediately discerned without some deep knowledge, sort of like stenographers short-hand. These are specifically taken from the idea of labanotation, which is commonly used to represent dance, as shown in this snippet from Brittanica "A page from Rudolf Laban’s Schrifttanz (1928), the origin of labanotation, which became the most widespread method of dance notation."


:: image via Encyclopedia Brittanica

I've been fascinated by these notational systems since looking at a volume of Halprin's work back in the mid-90s... along with many years playing tablature for guitar and mandolin... definitely a connection there - but is it a viable methodology for modern representation of spatial and movement dynamics? I'd love to hear more thoughts on what ideas others have for representation of motion (including new media methods for representation).

More to come on this somewhat random line of inquiry.

Personal Infrastructures

Working on some link house-cleaning and came up with a few posts that seems to thread together in an interesting narrative. The first of this was a beautiful installation for the 'Flower Street BioReactor' via Dezeen: "Los Angeles architects Emergent have designed an installation filled with green algae that produce oil by photosynthesis." This sort of decentralization of energy generation, which seemed to be a 2009 emerging idea.




:: imag
es via Dezeen

Another is a more functional pavement called Pavegen, which uses the ability to capture the continual motion of urban footsteps (via Inhabitat): "Every time a rubber Pavegen stone is stepped on it bends, producing kinetic energy that is either stored within lithium polymer batteries or distributed to nearby lights, information displays, and much more. Just five slabs spread over a lively sidewalk has the ability to generate enough energy to illuminate a bus stop throughout the night."



:: image via Inhabitat

We also carry with us powerful communication infrastructure, which uses more and more energy to stay powered. This leads to small-scale personal solar power for small devices, such as these skins for I-phones.


:: image via Treehugger

Or dual solar / wind charging like the K2 from Kinesis:


:: image via Treehugger

The ability to embed the landscape with energy-generation is one thing, but the logical next step will include a variety of wearable and portable and thus will become ubiquitous, as mentioned on Treehugger: "Yanko Design shows off an idea for a personal solar power pole. It's hardly a new idea (or hardly a bad idea...we love personal solar power around here), but the designer's concept image might slap us out of a gadget-obsessed stupor. When a beach scene looks like this, we know we're done for."



:: image via Treehugger

Perhaps this is just more junk to keep our ever expanding amount of junk running. When this is happening on the beach, it may be time to unplug.

A New Year

It's another year, and of course time to reflect on the previous year (and even decade) while looking forward to the upcoming year. Many changes are in store for the upcoming year, both professionally and with the content of Landscape+Urbanism - which is always a work in progress. Thanks for reading in 2009.


:: L+U image cloud via Wordle