Landscape Futures

[Images: The cover of Landscape Futures; book design by Brooklyn's Everything-Type-Company].

I'm enormously pleased to say that a book project long in the making will finally see the light of day later this month, a collaboration between ACTAR and the Nevada Museum of Art called Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions.

On a related note, I'm also happy to say simply, despite the painfully slow pace of posts here on the blog, going back at least the last six months or so, that many projects ticking away in the background are, at long last, coming to fruition, including Venue, and, now, the publication of Landscape Futures.

[Images: The opening spreads of Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

Landscape Futures both documents and continues an exhibition of the same name that ran for a bit more than six months at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, from August 2011 to February 2012. The exhibition was my first solo commission as a curator and by far the largest project I had worked on to that point. It was an incredible opportunity, and I remain hugely excited by the physical quality and conceptual breadth of the work produced by the show's participating artists and architects.

Best of all, I was able to commission brand new work from many of the contributors, including giving historian David Gissen a new opportunity to explore his ideas—on preservation, technology, and the environmental regulation of everyday urban space—in a series of wall-sized prints; finding a new genre—a fictional travelogue from a future lithium boom—for architects David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of The Living in which to experiment; and setting aside nearly an entire room, the centerpiece of the 2,500-square-foot exhibition, for an immensely complicated piece of functioning machinery (plus documentary photographs, posters, study-models, an entire bound book of research, and much else besides) by London-based architects Smout Allen, a design duo I refer to often here on BLDGBLOG.

Those works joined pre-existing projects by Mason White & Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office and InfraNet Lab, whose project "Next North/The Active Layer" explored the emerging architectural conditions presented by climate-changed terrains in the far north; Chris Woebken & Kenichi Okada, whose widely exhibited "Animal Superpowers" added a colorful note to the exhibition's second room; and architect-adventurer Liam Young, who brought his "Specimens of Unnatural History" successfully through international customs to model the warped future ecosystem of a genetically-enhanced Galapagos.

[Images: More spreads from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

But the book also voluminously expands on that central core of both new and pre-existing work to include original essays by Sam Jacob, Cassim Shepard, and Rob Holmes, but also texts by Alex Trevi (edited from their original appearance on Pruned), a travelogue through the lost lakes of the American West by Smudge Studio, a walking tour through the electromagnetic landscapes of Los Angeles from the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and a new short story by Pushcart Prize-winning author Scott Geiger.

These, in turn, join reprints of texts highly influential for the overall Landscape Futures project, including a short history of climate control technologies and weather warfare by historian James Fleming, David Gissen's excellent overview of the atmospheric preservation of artifacts in museums in New York City (specifically, the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and a classic article—from BLDGBLOG's perspective, at least—originally published in New Scientist back in 1998, where geologist Jan Zalasiewicz suggests a number of possibilities for the large-scale fossilization of entire urban landscapes in the Earth's far future.

Even that's not the end of the book, however, which is then further augmented by a long look, in the curator's essay, at the various technical and metaphoric implications of the instruments, devices, and architectural inventions of the book's subtitle, from robot-readable geotextiles and military surveillance technologies to the future of remote-sensing in archaeology, and moving between scales as divergent as plate-tectonic tomography, radio astronomical installations in the the polar north, and speculative laser-jamming objects designed by ScanLAB Projects.

To wrap it all up and connect the conceptual dots set loose across the book, detailed interviews with all of the exhibition's participating artists, writers, and architects fill out the book's long middle—and, in all cases, I can't wait to get these out there, as they are all conversations that deserve continuation in other formats. The responses from David Gissen alone could fuel an entire graduate seminar.

The spreads and images you see here all come directly from the book.

[Images: Spreads from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

Of course, the work itself also takes up a large section in the final third or so of the book; consisting mostly of photographs by Jamie Kingham and Dean Burton, these document the exhibition contents in their full, spatial context, including the double-height, naturally lit room in which the ceiling-mounted machinery of Smout Allen whirred away for six months. This is also where full-color spreads enter the book, offering a nice pop after all the pink that came before.

[Images: Installation shots from the Nevada Museum of Art, by Jamie Kingham and Dean Burton, including other views, from posters to renderings, from Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

Which brings us, finally, to the Landscape Futures Sourcebook, the final thirty or forty pages of the book, filled with the guest essays, travelogues, walking tours, photographs, a speculative future course brief by Rob Holmes of Mammoth, and the aforementioned short story by Scott Geiger.

[Images: A few spreads from the Landscape Futures Sourcebook featured in Landscape Futures; book design by Everything-Type-Company].

Needless to say, I am absolutely thrilled with the incredible design work done by Everything-Type-Company—a new and rapidly rising design firm based in Brooklyn, founded by Kyle Blue and Geoff Halber—and I am also over the moon to think that this material will finally be out there for discussion elsewhere. It's been a long, long time in the making.

In any case, shipping should begin later this month. Hopefully the above glimpses, and the huge list of people whose graphic, textual, or conceptual work is represented in the book, will entice you to support their effort with an order.

Enjoy!

(Thank you to all the people and organizations who made Landscape Futures possible, including the Nevada Museum of Art and ACTAR, supported generously by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts).

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Cross-Species Infrastructure

[Image: From "Assimilation" by Dillon Marsh].

I mentioned in the previous post the work of South African photographer Dillon Marsh, whose "Landscape Series" seeks "to find things that are out of the ordinary, picking them out of the landscape where they might otherwise blend in. I choose objects that can be found in multitude within their environment so that I can depict a family of objects in a series of photographs. By displaying each project as such, I feel I am able to show both the character of the individual members, and the characteristics that make these objects a family."

[Image: From "Assimilation" by Dillon Marsh].

Marsh's photos seen here were seemingly everywhere on the internet a few weeks ago, but I thought I'd post them nonetheless, as they're not only interesting images in and of themselves, but they depict one of my favorite topics: human infrastructure claimed—or assimilated, in Marsh's words—by nonhuman species, other builders and users of artificial environments, who construct their own homes on those underlying skeletons.

[Images: From "Assimilation" by Dillon Marsh].

It is an architecture of infestation, of creative reuse across species lines.

[Images: From "Assimilation" by Dillon Marsh].

So what is all this, more specifically? As Marsh explains, "In the vast barren landscapes of the southern Kalahari, Sociable Weaver Birds assume ownership of the telephone poles that cut across their habitat. Their burgeoning nests are at once inertly statuesque and teeming with life. The twigs and grass collected to build these nests combine to give strangely recognisable personalities to the otherwise inanimate poles."

[Images: From "Assimilation" by Dillon Marsh].

Seen one way, these photos depict an entire form of architecture reduced to ornament, mere biological decoration; seen another, they just as powerfully reveal how the smallest and seemingly most inconsequential additions to the built environment—incremental 3D fabrics of twigs, grass, and weeds—serve to augment that built environment through inhuman architectural means.

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Branch

[Image: From "Means to an End" by Dillon Marsh].

There are a few projects by the young South African photographer Dillon Marsh that seem worth a look.

[Image: From "Means to an End" by Dillon Marsh].

The first are his photos of "electricity pylons... criss-crossing the landscape around the city of Cape Town," called "Means to an End."

[Image: From "Means to an End" by Dillon Marsh].

Marsh is by no means the first photographer, artist, writer, architect, etc., to look at electricity pylons, but the resulting images are pretty stunning.

Meanwhile, Marsh has a variety of other series available for view on his website, but another one I want to feature briefly here is called "Limbo."

[Image: From "Limbo" by Dillon Marsh].

In Marsh's own words, "'Limbo' is a series of photographs showing trees that have died, but not yet fallen. All these trees were photographed in various suburbs of the Cape Flats area of Cape Town, including Bridgetown, Bonteheuwel, Ruyterwacht, Windermere, and The Hague."

The results perhaps recall the "Rise" filter, as well as the square format of Instagram, but, for me, that doesn't take away from their visual or conceptual interest.

[Images: From "Limbo" by Dillon Marsh].

Oddly, these actually remind me of the trees in Hackney, a borough of London where I briefly lived more than a decade ago; the branches of almost every tree along the streets that I walked each morning to the local bus stop had been cut—or hacked, as it were—by the Council, apparently out of a mathematically impossible fear of liability should the branches someday fall and hit a car, a pedestrian, or a baby in a stroller, lending the neighborhood an even drearier feel of grey-skied Gothic horror than it would have had already on its own.

[Images: From "Limbo" by Dillon Marsh].

Somewhere between portraits and landscape photography, these two projects of Marsh's go well together, depicting the starkly exposed branching peculiar to these two types of structures.

They are also both in Marsh's "Landscape Series" of photographs, a series that, in his words, seeks "to find things that are out of the ordinary, picking them out of the landscape where they might otherwise blend in. I choose objects that can be found in multitude within their environment so that I can depict a family of objects in a series of photographs. By displaying each project as such, I feel I am able to show both the character of the individual members, and the characteristics that make these objects a family."

I'll do one more quick post, showing my favorite series of all.

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London Laocoön

[Image: Machines slide beneath the streets, via Crossrail].

The Crossrail tunnels in London—for now, Europe's largest construction project, scheduled to finish in 2018—continue to take shape, created in a "tunneling marathon under the streets of London" that aims to add 26 new miles of underground track for commuter rail traffic.

It's London as Laocoön, wrapped in tunnel-boring machines, mechanical snakes that coil through their own hollow nests beneath the city.

[Image: Looking down through shafts into the subcity, via Crossrail].

What interested me the most in all this, however, was simply that fact that the first tunneling machine put to work in this round of excavation is called Phyllis—

[Image: Phyllis, via Crossrail].

—named after Phyllis Pearsall, widely (but incorrectly?) mythologized as the founder of the legendary A-Z book of London street maps.

There's something very Psychogeography Lite™ in this, weaving your city together from below with a giant machine-needle named after the woman who (supposedly) first walked the streets of the capital, assembling her book of maps, as if the only logical direction to go, once you've mapped the surface of your city, is down, passing through those surfaces to explore larger and darker volumes of urban space.

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Space in the Adaptive Plastic

[Image: An otherwise irrelevant photo of early night-vision technology used during the Vietnam War; courtesy of the U.S. Army].

So where were we?

Just clearing out a few old links for a fresh start. Last spring, Danger Room reported that DARPA had been hoping to step into the world of "battlefield illusions," developing "technologies that will 'manage the adversary’s sensory perception' in order to 'confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his or her] actions.'" This includes "frontline illusions intended to disrupt enemy warfighters' thought patterns."

The program—a kind of military-sensory complex—is based on the belief that "if researchers can better understand 'how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs,' the military should be able to develop 'auditory and visual' hallucinations that will 'provide tactical advantage for our forces.'"

But what might the architectural—or the more generally urban, the very broadly spatial—implications of such a technology be? Can managing or choreographing perception through shared hallucinations and techniques of sensory misdirection in the built environment be a tool increasingly useful for designers today? Even DARPA refers to this sub-class of programs as "Shaping the Environment"—so is there a civilian, or, more accurately, a deweaponized, version of these deployable "illusions" that could be used by architects or even by set & interior designers for real-time augmentations of everyday space? For "engineering ghosts" in the rooms around us, where the rooms themselves are sometimes ghosts?

After all, urban design as a hand-me-down technology from the military is nothing new, so adapting battlefield misperceptions to architectural use on the homefront would hardly be surprising.

Perhaps it'd be like Microsoft's patented Immersive Display Experience, an architecture of overlapping stitched projections such that "the peripheral image appears as an extension of the primary image," and, in the process, the room you're standing in becomes a game display.

[Image: Microsoft's Immersive Display Experience].

How could this be used by architects?

While we're on the subject of DARPA, meanwhile, another even older piece of news from their designers' desks was this 2011 announcement that they'd begun constructing "an entirely new class of electronic systems that can meet the demands of dynamic environments." These would be called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (or SyNAPSE), a "program [that] aims to fundamentally alter conventional designs by developing biological-scale neuromorphic electronic systems that mimic important functions of a human brain." A strange future of neuromorphic plastic brains illusioneering streets into existence—invisible cities, flickering and disruptive—we humans will try and, haplessly, fail to navigate.

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