Mediascapes: The Fogbank Vlog

Juan Azulay, Instructor and Ed Keller, Program Coordinator

The contemporary city is more than ever defined in the wake of a relation game of continuities and discontinuities, visibilities and invisibilities arguably best characterized by William James as 'reality falling in passing'.

The Spring 2008 MediaScapes Studio, through the study, conceptualization and conjectural positioning of Los Angeles as the product of a series of recurring 'nested genetic doubles' will exorcise an encounter for forces of matter seen and unseen, extended over a time-based narrative machine.

The Fogbank emerges through those who seek to track the ethical force we use to navigate its peculiar density. Previous models for Fogbank navigation couplings have been shown on Chris Marker's "The Zone" in Sans Soleil, Palahniuk's "Fight Club" in Fincher's Fight Club or Godard-Lang's "Ulysses" in Godard's Contempt. These are organizations of time and matter that proactively drive from nested mechanisms, precarious genetic codes that can alter matter and bend with it as it is instantly inscribed in culture.

There will be writing, mapping, modeling, art direction, shooting, vfx/animation, coding, blogging, editing and performing components to the project. Knowledge of filmmaking and/or visual narrative is a plus but not necessary, commitment to around the clock work, unfamiliar schedules and insatiable curiosity for Los Angeles (even in the form of hatred), a requirement.

3 Minute Still Frame Film | February 20, 2008

Premise: To construct a 3 minute film with stills written, photographed, edited, post-produced, sound designed by student.
Duration: 1 Week
Objective: First past at directorial goal, to lock in a spatio-temporal narrative coupling with a series of still images within single and multi threaded storylines, set in Los Angeles.

» Go to the Vlog / view projects / provide feedback

Hello all. I hope you feel encouraged to contribute to this discussion. As the instructor for the studio, let me lay out a clarification and two definitions.

a. Clarification:

Students were encouraged to upload the raw version of the project. As a one week project it was far more productive to allow accidents and agility than seamlessness. Since the end goal of the studio will entail a high production value project, these film exercises are intended to function as the equivalents of working sketch models. It will help to think of them in this manner.

b. Two definitions:

"Time Based Narrative Machine" (thanks el dude): This is a more specific definition of film - mainly related to two things. One is montage theory as seen in early Russian film (Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, most notably) and the other is the collapse of documentary and fiction, as seen through the essay film (most notably Chris Marker).

My friend and colleague Ed Keller gave an incredible lecture in studio today and laid down this very point using Antonioni's Blowup and Marker's Sans Soleil. The juxtaposition of non-directed shots spanning breaks in time construct a mechanism for time travel that rebuilds the fabric of reality where it was once broken. I like to say that these construct a time-base (a precariously subjective world) where reality falls in passing.

"Nested Genetic Doubles": The idea of a world inside a world in the alchemical sense. The containment of fate inside of fate, of space inside space. "Little Tokyo" in Los Angeles is defined as a spatial boundary. "Tokyo inside Los Angeles", if seen as a genetic double instead, includes the ghosts of Pearl Harbor, Nobu Matsuhisa, Manzanar, Lost in Translation and Shinto perhaps, arranged through a mutual incantation (usually collective) of memory and matter, which is a second or third Los Angeles - not little but global, not ethnic but virtually beyond ethnic.

Essentially, it can only be accessed with the above mentioned time machine. What a tautological bastard.

OK - MORE LATER. I'll post review notes to the individual films soon.

About the "Time Based Narrative Time Machine" .... I'm thinking specifically of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, where Billy Pilgrim learned the true secret of time travel: it was not movement in time as much as it was reliving specific episodes from one's life ... which is why he kept dreading time travel, as it meant that he would keep revisiting the most awful moments of his life.

I think another literary equivalent is Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow ... note that each chapter and/or section break begins with 7 squares. These are reminiscent of film sprockets. And the fact that the filmic narrative does indeed span "breaks in time" is reinforced by the very final paragraph, where you are reading an "in-time" description of the Schwarzgerät as it crashes into (and through) a screen of a movie theater in downtown Los Angeles.

I also wonder if the narration in Sans Soleil is more important than the footage. I'm not sure if the film would fall into the category of "non-objective", as "Sandor Krasna" (the central European cinematographer who "wrote" the letters being read aloud in the film) is Chris Marker's pseudonym. It is also Chris Marker's Flickr screen name (or is it?).

S Mc S S - Good catch. I meant 'non-directed', not 'non-objective'. I've asked Paul to fix it as it changes the entire meaning of the paragraph. When I read your comment - which I think is very good - I couldn't understand what you meant until I read what I had written... then I found it!

I think you are dead on in bringing Pynchon up. We have gone over 'Crying of Lot 49' in previous iterations.

In terms of Sandor Krasna's Flickr site what cracks me up is the comment on the Iceland Twins photo "It reminds me of a beautiful film I once saw, Sans Soleil". A wonderful series of voluntary-involuntary mirrors.

juan,
more you keep clarifying your own words, more we are drifting away from los angeles.
it is getting a bit taxing. energy should not be spent on decoding you. the public forum inclusion has some basic requirements (should be read as suggestion) and one of them is to keep the wording simple and clear, so the participants can get to work of talking about the actual material at hand, instead of picking on your vulnarable opening.
otherwise, the packaging can get more important than the footage delivery.
don't let this to be a trivia exercise.
in some cases, giving precise visual references can be counter productive to the birth of original works, but that's my own art education observation.
you can get back to the city and allow unsolicited narratives to take a place and storylines to emerge on their own.
perhaps another way to explore is, via refuting the previous and referenced visuals, and definations.
can forgetting be part of the narrative in this exercise?

thanks for putting it out there. it is a promising class.

i guess i would like to offer some student perspective in this..first, i would have to disagree with you orhan that there is some standard for public forums. the way i see it, anything goes, and without clarification, all you will get is a series of reductive jabs like El Dude's comment, and frankly, I think archinect is occupied with a little too much of that. as a student, there is nothing productive i can do with those comments, but i think smokety's and juan's conversation elicit some interesting references and questions that allow me to frame my approach towards the final project.

second, since we are all amateurs in film making, i think it would be a misguided leap to leave all of these references behind and just go out there to seek 'original' work, but i think that question is besides the point. if the question is whether or not there is enough objectivity in our methodology and footage gathering, then i would like to clarify that the premise for the still videos was in fact very open. each student was basically given the freedom to go out with a camera to collect images of any subject they wanted. the only constraint was the length and the still frame format. however, within the editing process, it becomes subjective, but that is to be expected; your los angeles can be and probably is, much different than mine, respectfully.

i think it would be reductive to say that our objective is just to make a documentary film, but to frame the problem in terms of the 'collapse of documentary and fiction', then i think we are in a better position to achieve 'original work' or at the least it allows us to challenge our assumptions of documentary film making.

in the end though, i think we would all agree that the work should speak for itself, and i would encourage more feedback on the individual pieces on the 'vlog'...i'm not a big fan of that term btw, but i would still like to give a big shout out to paul p. for setting this up.

O - I'll try to answer in a way that does not sound stuck up (!?)

This is not about me or my work but is the intro piece of the studio - which is meant to be a provocation and an identification of a beginning by me, and nothing else. I decided to frame it the way I did, that's that.

A lot of the decisions come because of the studio's ambition for architects to make films (other than walk-thrus with aphex twin or bjork soundtracks), instead of talking about them. In the beginning, there is always a bit of talk (this is the 3rd 1 week exercise of the semester) - which is what you are responding to.

This feature is about the student work (read Paul's setup), which I wish was getting more attention. It's the whole point of the experiment. If they don't get their work seen and commented, then putting all this up is less valuable.

Please be even more generous than you have and comment on the student films...

---

1. I think the following exercise premise is actually very simple and I really think the work lives up to doing, not talking.

2. As far as the question of references goes, it is simple: "Vertigo" is a good film and "Transformers" isn't. Eisenstein is a good writer on film and Roger Ebert isn't. With reference citation, I simply encourage people that haven't seen things like "Lisbon Story" to go see/find/come ...

So if I have to keep pounding the references to set up benchmarks of good quality and technique I will, regardless of how much they have been talked about. I have no aspirations to critical glory to worry about that - and certainly no debts to history.

(continued in next post - hit the 2500 word limit)

3. As far as taxing goes, what is really taxing are phrases like "the public forum inclusion has some basic requirements..." While I know what you are saying is well intentioned and constructive, it sounds like a closet-enforcement fetish or vigilante-ism - the death of vital societies and the beginning of all genocides. But I know this is not what you mean just like you know me or my students can't take ownership of your art school education - or anyone else's (sometimes not even our own!).

Also, I don't assume that people of the internet are all "one sentence, small cap, one liner cheap shot, weak witted" people. Archinect (and many online publications) have had very good features in the past to support that, and a very intelligent community. I think you are proof of that intelligent species, no?

That also reminds me that I have to do my taxes. I am going to get killed this year I think.

4. I would be DELIGHTED if the work was about refuting the references and forgetting, above all, the prompts and focused on inventing their own real.

5. Sincerely, thanks for reading and taking the trouble to engage the problem. It is truly appreciated. Also, if you are in L.A. you are cordially invited to reviews and/or events we may be having. I'll keep people posted.

Apologies in advance if I keep obscuring the truth with my words.

i really recommend 10 th. victim. as a plot and political commentary.

for the students, i'd recommend some industrial films and their structures.

special note to dot;
do not be so judgemental on short but effective commenting by whomever, 1.
you are not in a position to dismmiss people who are willing to think and write about 'your' class, if anything, you could say thank you, 2.
i did not recommend you particularly bypass your reading/viewing list, 3.

orhan,

do you think el duderino's comment was effective? comments can be short and effective, but if anything, that comment was dismissive, and to me, didn't reflect any thought. his/her intention may have been to engage the class, but i didn't see it that way.

but if you are questioning my etiquette, then take a look at my responses on my school blog, i make a point to give appreciation to any comment about the work i post no matter how positive/negative so long as it's substantial...so please hold your judgement.

Thanks O. We'll put it on the list. I hope the question of politics is taken up in projects, as I believe it is essential to the possibility of what we are trying to do.

BTW- Everyone is invited to the Film Series. Every Monday at 7PM at SCI-Arc by the Main Space.

Here's the semesters list:

http://mediascapes.wikispaces.com/SP08Filmseries

thanks juan, i have seen almost all the films on your list and absolutely like all of them and don't mind to see some of them again, for the umpteenth time.
i think you'll find Elio Petri's film interesting, if you haven't seen it already.
i will get a cd copy of it from a director friend next week, and i'll be glad to let you make a copy of it.
another great wenders film 'the state of things,' i recommend. specially, the abondoned motel in portugal, final scenes in century city plaza and in producer's winnebago. it is about making a film where wenders kind of plays himself.
and while at it, i can't help not think of raymond carver based altman film 'short cuts.' any conjectural film propositions should also take a good look at films like this, where the essence of the city masterfully told. it relates to very reality los angeles relentlessly struggles with.

i have left series of comments on different projects since yesterday. i will get to the ones i didn't comment on, in time, please don't take it personally.

in general, i am looking forward to see the footage starting to touch base with some architectural and urban design realms in more direct ways, commentary like, if not right out subversive invasion.
maybe it is not what the class is all about, but what if?

should we look at these developing projects from architectural seats also?

some more clips:
this & this might be particular interest.

so i just made an honest attempt to comment on the films, i'm thinking maybe mixing the order up so everyone doesn't just comment on the first few...

i witnessed an Ed Keller lecture at UPenn and i liked all the philosophy we read before he showed up...i'm completely oblivious to any film by the way...but what i couldn't quite decipher...ummm

film that isn't packaged in some type of logic that is pretty common always seems sort of surreal to me, even the deeply logical. usually if anything, the film seems totally irrelevant to even what it states it's driving at. i don't have this problem with text that isn't poetical... and then there's the whole playback and playback that i make akin to playing a math formula over and over until it's this final image as a virtual model of something...(i think this is what i understood from Keller's lecture) somehow this virtual model effects the actual and it's back and forth, etc...

i'm rambling because i don't understand quite yet...

but this "Time Based Narrative Machine" - is this supposed to point out something we might miss in reality kind of like a philosopher points out a point you might miss in passing.

is TBNM supposed to be conscioussness and effect conscioussness at the same time? tieing us into Vonnegut's best line in Slaughterhouse 5 - (paraphrased) all moments in time have always been, are, and always will be....is this how the "Nested Genetic Doubles"...or are these NGD's virtual models (deleuze) that become real, like a unicorn is virtual until it becomes real one day...

i'm asking the impossible here, but can film really inform a movie retard like myself of deep issues like these writting above, without seeming overly surreal and oblivously irrelevant?

I wrote that llas night very tired and realized I miswrote the deleuze point...for him everything is real even the virtual. there is the virtual and the actual and both real. ithe way I am reading this the film should be understood to be just as real right. so a bunch of real LA s ?

oh and the video above did not quite make it to the end, ,not sure if its my cpu or archinect

there is also this great archinect feature from last summer.
i know you guys are not doing music videos and all, but treat this as a short film festival since they were hand picked by few of us on mason's lead. they are loosely related to architectural objectivity.
there is even an urbanism section in it...

I recently saw a movie that I highly recommend for this class, not very widely know, as it has been only sporadically shown and only now came out on dvd as a restoration effort from UCLA Film and Television Archive, 30 years after initial release, director Charles Burnett.

http://www.killerofsheep.com/

Fellini meets the Watts neighborhood in the '70's. I think i have been waiting for this movie without knowing it.

"Time-Based Narrative Machine." I remember being a first year architecture student. We received projects about spatial analysis, folding investigations, layering constructs and things called things like "visual obstruction generators." Perhaps the things we made were "architectural," but certainly not architecture by standards i later learned. Looking back, I know that if I as a first year student of architecture were asked to make architecture, certainly somewhere in my final presentation drawing of a connecticut style farmhouse would be a lifted detail from a pella window.

It seems to me that a component of this studio functions as a crash course first year film class, and like first year architecture students, referring to "film"as a "Time-Based Narrative Machine", broadens the thinking far enough to allow students to make what they otherwise might not if they were asked to make a "film": in a sense, Transformers and Ebert approvals, farmhouses and pella windows. Supposing that's true, form me it makes sense to call them "Time-Based Narrative Machines"

This brings up pedagogy.This is the first studio of this kind, or at least this title - i don't know if you've taught this material under a different guise - at SCIArc. Would it be appropriate to also add notes on how the teaching process is unfolding? We're always students, and I think perhaps this studio is as much a project for you, Ed and Juan, as the films are for the students, and no doubt there are professors and masters degree candidates following this feature. As the students discuss the unfolding of their films and each of their films' successes and failures, indeed a narrative unfolds; a narrative valuable to the community to whom you guys have opened it up.

(cont'd)

I know this feature isn't about you, Ed and Juan, but perhaps creating part of the narrative that includes you - broader, more pedagogic than your comments on the students' TBNMs - may be an intriguing addition and perhaps a valuable piece of dialog for those considering becoming professors or those who add an academic component to their design careers. Indeed, perhaps this would create a "nested genetic double" inside your feature.

At first glance, this idea confronts ethical issues related to allowing such entries to unfold coincident with the studio, but consider not thinking of it as notes on your teaching experience or progress reports on the successes and failures of the studio, but rather like something as broad as a "pedagogic (dis)ruption machine."

Marlin,

It's not a bad idea. I'll put something together, as it is very interesting from a curricular standpoint.

I'll speak to the studio pedagogy, as I am teaching it, and it has a very specific origin and background.

Ed's position, in this case of program director (and fall studio instructor) might be a bit different, so I couldn't speak directly to that. Maybe he'll chime in at some point.

Anyway, coming soon.

Thanks for the interest and all the contributions.

Review Invite: Dear colleagues, friend and fellow crazies,

I am extending you an invitation to attend the midterm review of the Mediascapes Vertical Studio for the Spring of '08 titled The Fogbank. Students are working on essay film projects about Los Angeles, drawn from the uncertain waters between architecture, film making and urban studies. I am attaching the brief and some links to help you decipher what the hell it might be about. I look forward to your response regarding your possible attendance.

We don't need you for too much of your valuable time, but we need your sharp sense of judgment. Please let me know if you can make it at least a little while.

For those who know me: this time it WILL start on time, as we are all boarding a plane to Utah at 8.00 PM and we are NOT missing it.

Day: Friday March 14th
Time: 12.30 PM - 5.00 PM.
Place: SCI-Arc - Main Space Theater

Links:

Syllabus: http://mediascapes.wikispaces.com/MediaSCAPES+SP08

Archinect Feature: http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=71596_0_23_0_C

About Mediascapes: www.sciarcmediascapes.net

About SCI-Arc: www.sciarc.edu

Students: Nina Marie Barbuto, Jovan Rodriguez, Tim Do, Randy Stogsdill, Elif Ensari, George Labeth, Eric Battino, Saman Hosseini and Salman Masmouei, Benjamin Rice, Valentina Vasi, Prabhu Prasanth, Matt Cavender, Jesse Madrid, Ryan Kehoe and Doug Wiganowske.

Instructor: Juan Azulay

You are cordially invited to the final review of the Spring Mediascapes studio. This semesters' project, titled "The Fogbank", deals with the contemporary ambiguity of boundaries of reality-making within mechanically and digitally distributed media.

What once was documentary filmmaking (direct cinema, cinema verite or essay film) is now directly collapsed into an ever expanding construct of a very precarious morphology of the real, which no longer accepts the templates we once relied on.

By reconsidering the terms of spatial and temporal disjunction, set forth by Eisenstein and Kuleshov in their use of montage – the studio has attempted to problematize the city, its spaces and event systems by using the spatio-temporal base of film in a reversible manner, as a rejection of both synthetic montage and unitary urbanism; and as a blind embrace of ritualized bio and geopolitical drive, as a way to find new and alternative techniques between time and space through media.

The location is SCI-Arc's Main Space. The time is 3PM to 7PM. The day is April 16th.

You can find the studio syllabus here: http://mediascapes.wikispaces.com/MediaSCAPES+SP08

You can find the Archinect VLOG for the first portion here: http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=71596_0_23_0_C

You can find the Mediascapes website here: http://www.sciarcmediascapes.net/

Sciarc's website: http://www.sciarc.edu

About Juan Azulay, Instructor: http://www.ma77er.com

The students: Nina Marie Barbuto, Randy Stogsdill, Jesse Madrid, Doug Wiganowske, Tim Do, George LaBeth, Eric Battino, Valentina Vasi, Matt Cavender, Ben Rice, Ryan Kehoe, Salman Masmouei, Prabhu Sugumar, Saman Hosseini, Elif Ensari and Jovan Rodriguez.