Arthub is proud to host of Speedism collective in Shanghai again, in collaboration with TIM (Theatre in Motion).
Speedism is the duo Julian Friedauer and Pieterjan Ginckels. They work in the field of architecture, architectural theory, visual arts, visual theory, urban tactics, imagineering, visual arts and scriptwriting. As visual artists and architects, and starting from these backgrounds, Speedism develops visual universes, theoretical landscapes, denkraume, narratives and scenarios.
Speedism uses different forms of input, ranging from wikipedia, mythology, urban theory, geopolitical analysis, technical restrictions, music, and so on, in a random and non-hierarchical order. They are mixed into images in the chronological order they are collected, with no pre-set planning, creating a result that is never an ending point but always gives rise to a new point of departure. Speedism keeps on drawing, fine-tuning, exchanging, going from the one to the other association. Step by step, starting from scratch and growing from pixel to pixel so to speak, they create digital images that can be read as visual scenarios, narrative story boards or imagined fictions, following no other strategy than the process itself. Or in other words: rather than a pre-conceived basis for the image, the narrative is the actual outcome of the image compilation.
Speedism presents these images in lecture-performances, as prints installed in and scaled for a specific spatial context, or they build a context around them – a three-dimensional addition to the image.
The performative potential of the compilation of the Speedism image forms another basis of exploration. In public Speed Trips, Ginckels and Friedauer invite different hosts to introduce a random place in a to them unknown city, and share the ride with whoever wants to join. In true tourist fashion, they hop from the one to the other destination without expressing the wish to understand the city in its totality. In the Speed Trips, they propose the city as a real-life Speedism imagination, and put possible interactions between both to the test.
We suspect that Speedism’s working mode - fast, post-reflective and action-based - mirrors the way in which cities are in effect operating in China, or more concretely, how the people in it, relate to it. One could argue that the specific condition of the Chinese city is borne out of the instant moment that its multilayered realities, chronologies and influences clash with each other. Especially the ongoing dynamic between formal and informal architectures of respectively planners and people - where a plan is set, an informal reality is attached to it, consequently transforming that plan - calls for an understanding of the Chinese urban tissue as a chain of temporalities. This calls for strategies to live this urban reality alike, and could explain why acting upon seems better fit than theorizing the Chinese city. Taking the leap back to Speedism, we make a final reference to role of the rendered image most notably in Chinese planning and architectural strategy. When exploring how Speedism’s digital imaginations can be traced back in reality, the render - as a visual translation of the imagined into the real - seems to be an important missing link. Furthermore, the render exercises a strange kind of temporality by itself, juxtaposing future with present in the form of a constructed image. We can not help but wonder whether Speedism’s photoshops are somehow the mirror of China’s rendered reality?
A selection of the digital images that Speedism creates in China were published in the Urban China magazine this coming January 2009, in an issue guest-edited by Neville Mars.
DREAM/DOOM
The chinese future is bright and shiny. It is dictated by a dream, the chinese dream. But beneath this dream there lies always doom. The bigger the dream the higher the fall into doom. SPEEDISM peeks behind this dreambubble and explores the doom. In the recent project DOOM DOUGH (shown in URBAN CHINA #35) we described the chinese dream as something sad. In pictures the shiny dream is always filled with kitsch
and romantic desires. But in romanticism these desires are often connected with sadness, what we desire lies already in the past and will remain lost. The opposite to this is the happy doom. It’s chaotic, unexpected and wild. It’s like a kid playing in the dirt. The doom is like a party in a dark and booming club.
In DOOM DOUGH we tried to show in 8+1 steps a conversion from dream to doom. In the end the ninth step, the plus one, was no doom. The final step mixed the previous 8 steps together in one big image/architecture/city. Dream and doom coexisted like twins or even became one.
TECHNO ARCHITECTURE
Villem Flusser, a known czech philosopher, examines forms of communication,imagery and codes in traditional and modern societies. He differs in his book communicology between image and techno-image. The image is the traditional imagery, the painting, the written text. The techno-image gathers the modern kinds of communication like photography and movie. A primary aspect of this separation is the interpretation of these codes. Flusser says that the society reads photography like a painting and movies like a theatre play or even a narrative text, which is wrong. Due to it’s production process a movie contains different understandings of time, space and scale than a narrative story. For example the time can be played backwards or stopped and so on. So Flusser claims that a movie cannot be understood as a linear story just like a photography of a mushroom is not a mushroom. SPEEDISM copies this techno idea and pastes it into architecture. The render known as still image and animated movie becomes techno. TECHNO ARCHITECTURE is liable to its own laws and codes and can not be read like built architecture anymore. Where architectural visualization tried to represent a future architecture, TECHNO ARCHITECTURE gains
now its own agility. Physical and displaying laws can be overthrown. TECHNO ARCHITECTURE can collapse and reassemble at the same time. It can act in different angles and perspectives. It exists in multiple times at once. Like in Flusser’s techno images the TECHNO ARCHITECTURE does not need traditional measurements. How big is digital architecture? The monument becomes nonmonumental.
The agility of built architecture is given by its inhabitants. TECHNO ARCHITECTURE becomes a living tectonic on its own. TECHNO ARCHITECTURE can dance, cry, bleed and die.
The rendered reality becomes the real render!
TECHNO SHANGHAI
TECHNO ARCHITECTURE is neither a prediction of a built future nor a visualization of reality. TECHNO ARCHITECTURE creates its own reality and presence. According to this a rendered version of shanghai cannot act or look like the real city. TECHNO SHANGHAI has its own building and design codes. It becomes a techno urban place. Highways turn into veins, the Yangtze transmutes into a black-mirrored doubleganger embraced by dark and dusty clouds, ‘thames-towned’ tv towers rise from the ground and dance in circles…TECHNO SHANGHAI combines the sweetest dream with the darkest doom. A concentrated DOOM SHANGHAI meets a purified DREAM SHANGHAI. TECHNO SHANGHAI will be an overglorification of real shanghai…. maybe more dreadful, maybe more beautiful…. at least it will be an architecture “…that bleeds, exhausts, that turns and even breakes…that glows, that stabs, that tears and rips when stretched”.
SPEEDISM plus CRYSTAL CG
In the field of computer graphics (CG) CRYSTAL CG is the leading company on the asian market. For more than a decade CRYSTAL gathered knowledge and reputation in 3D visualization. This turns them into one of the main protagonists in the imagineering process of the chinese dream. SPEEDISM works in the fields of architecture, architectural theory, visual arts, visual theory, urban tactics, imagineering, visual arts and scriptwriting. As visual artists and architects, and starting from these backgrounds SPEEDISM develops a visual universe,theoretical landscapes, denkräume, narratives and scenarios. Doom as the happy antidream
is an essential component of these works. TECHNO SHANGHAI, as the combination of DOOM SHANGHAI and DREAM SHANGHAI and its intensification, could be a perfect situation to merge the knowledge and expertise of CRYSTAL CG and SPEEDISM.
The aim would be to produce a creative environment between CRYSTAL CG and SPEEDISM, where we crop multiply and liquify… where we extrude, map and render…where all these techniques are mixed together. Our ambition is to create this TECHNO SHANGHAI as an animated movie, where dream and doom are twins, father and mother, high and low….where dream leaps back and doom fast-forwards,where dream is a shiny
diamond and doom is a concrete disco-ball. together they will become something new,something more shiny and more concrete… TECHNO!!!
This theoretical bubble has to be filled now. To start with the project SPEEDISM will be the first week in shanghai on their own. In this stage SPEEDISM will develop their idea of doom shanghai by strolling around, creating sketches, images, animated gifs and writing aphorisms.
In the second week of the shanghai trip SPEEDISM works at and with CRYSTAL CG. We mash up both sides, our doom and your dream (mostly the shanghai 2010 film) and create together a storyboard for TECHNO SHANGHAI.
Out of this story board we start a productive back and forth between us. We would like to ask for available CRYSTAL 3D material (from shanghai 2010 film and other shanghaiprojects) to use and abuse it… we take blocks out, adjust them, put new things in the, rescale parts, put smoke in it…. we also want to give it back and let CRYSTAL do the same deconsruction/reconstruction on our stuff. After that process the stuff will be
animated and rendered. Through cutting postproduction we put then an additional and final techno-layer on it, where the image and the image-flux will be also deconstructed/reconstructed.
