Arthub Hosts Architectural Collective Speedism
Partnered with Crystal CG, DOOM vs DREAM
Yet again Arthub is proud to host the Speedism collective in Shanghai, 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. Starting from a visual art and architecture background 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 never reaches an end point, but always gives rise to a new point of departure. Speedism keeps on drawing, fine-tuning, exchanging, going from one association to another. 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, and also as three-dimensional additions to the image.
The performative potential of the compilation of Speedism image forms another basis of exploration. In public Speed Trips, Ginckels and Friedauer invite different hosts to introduce a random place in an unknown city to them, and share the ride with whoever wants to join. In true tourist fashion, they hop from one destination to another without expressing a desire 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 the city. 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 respective planners and people–where a plan is set, an informal reality is attached. Consequently, transforming that plan, calls for an understanding of the Chinese urban tissue as a chain of temporalities. This calls for strategies to live alike within this urban reality, and could explain why acting rather than theorizing seems like a better fit for a Chinese city.
Taking the leap back to Speedism, we make a final reference to the 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 rendered–as a visual translation of the imagined into the real–there seems to be an important missing link. Furthermore, the rendered 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 will be published in the Urban China magazine this coming January 2009, in an issue guest-edited by Neville Mars.
The Project
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 their 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 already lies in the past and will remain lost. The opposite of 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 9th step, the plus one, there was no doom. The final step mixed the previous 8 steps together in one big image/architectural project/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 differentiates between images and techno-images in his book Communicology. The “image” includes traditional imagery, such as paintings and written text. The “techno-image” incorporates modern kinds of communication, like photography and movie. A primary aspect of this separation is the interpretation of these codes. Flusser says that society reads photography like a painting and watches 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, time can be played backwards or stopped altogether–altered in ways that a narrative story cannot. So Flusser claims that a movie cannot be understood as a linear story just like a photo of a mushroom is not a mushroom.
Speedism copies this techno idea and pastes it into architecture. They render known still images and animated movies they becomes techno. Techno Architecture is liable to its own laws and codes and cannot be read like built architecture anymore. Where architectural visualization tries to represent future architecture, Techno Architecture then gains its own agility. Physical and display 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 definition a rendered version of Shanghai cannot act or look like the real city. Techno Shanghai has its own buildings 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 the real Shanghai, maybe more dreadful, maybe more beautiful, at least it will be a unique form of architecture. As Speedism describes it, a city “that bleeds, exhausts, that turns and even breaks… one 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 CG gathered knowledge and built upon their reputation in 3D visualization. This turned them into one of the main protagonists in the imagineering process of the Chinese dream. Speedism works in various fields, including: architecture, architectural theory, visual arts, visual theory, urban tactics, imagineering, visual arts and scriptwriting. As visual artists and architects, starting from these backgrounds Speedism is able to develop a visual universe, theoretical landscapes, denkräume, narratives and scenarios. Doom as the happy anti-dream 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 could crop, multiply and liquify. A collaboration in which we can extrude, map and render, where all these techniques are mixed together. Our ambition is to create present Techno Shanghai as an animated movie, where dream and doom are twins, father and mother, high and low. Dream leaps back and doom fast-forwards; 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. At the beginning of the project Speedism will spend a week in Shanghai on their own. At 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 will work at and with Crystal CG. We will mash up both sides, our doom and your dream (mostly the Shanghai 2010 film) and create together a story board for Techno Shanghai.
Out of this story board a productive back and forth will begin. We would like to ask for available Crystal 3D material (from Shanghai 2010 film and other Shanghai projects) to use and abuse. We plan to take blocks out, adjust them, put new things in, rescale parts, put smoke in it, altering it in every way imaginable. We also want to give it back and let Crystal CG do the same deconsruction/reconstruction on our own product. After that process the stuff will be animated and rendered. After cutting postproduction we will then include an additional and final techno-layer, where the image and the image-flux will be also deconstructed/reconstructed.
