London after the rain

Ben Marzys is "a young London based designer with an academic background in architecture and motion design". He produced the above video in 02006 while a student in Nic Clear's Unit 15 at the Bartlett School of Architecture. BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh explains in a profile of Clear for Dwell magazine (March 02008) how moving images are integrated into the curriculum:

Each film functions as an architectural proposal -- or as an avant-garde form of urban analysis, albeit of a decidedly futuristic kind. This suits Clear just fine.

"Film can be a much more appropriate way of training architects than the traditional reliance on orthographic representation," says Clear, who once also studied philosophy, "and the skills learned in film production are great for transferring to conventional architecture. Even at the most basic organizational level, film is all about the flow of information. A decision you make now can have enormous consequences later."
[...]
"This type of work opens up a whole new series of possibilities about what architecture is," Clear explains. "The availability of film tools fulfills a deep-seated need in architecture to communicate beyond an architectural audience. But for all my polemic about the spatial, immersive, experiential, and narrative qualities of film, the main reason I teach this way is because it is so much fun."

Amen.

The short came to my attention via the recent London Festival of Architecture (noted here earlier). On 12 July 02008 it was screened as part of onedotzero terrain 07: "distinctive visions and evocative interpretations of terrains and environments real and imagined, from built urban worlds to the shifting rural landscape and beyond". I was in the city at the time, but wasn't able to make it to the show. Still, even on a laptop screen, the tone of this short film (aptly described in in Manaugh's Dwell piece as "both Edenic and postapocalyptic") is arresting. The motion-collage and sudden context switches made me think of Röyksopp's music video "Eple", and the empty, yet somehow whimsical après-déluge imagery put me in mind of Mary Mattingly's series Second Nature, as well as Squint/Opera's series Flooded London 2090.

Other work by Marzys includes the somewhat jauntier and less polished 2012 (02006), and the more abstract, mood-driven Dystopian Dreams (02007); both videos exploring similar territory.

I'm interested to see where he goes with this work, and equally, look forward to seeing what else emanates from Unit 15. Certainly, their communicatively rich and broad conception of architecture is converging on the exploratory practice of experiential futures that keeps this blogger busy.

Related posts:
> Not drowning, thriving
> Second Nature

Not drowning, thriving

Flood (dir. Tony Mitchell, 02007); image captured from DVD ch. 13

Yesterday, almost a year after my spies in London spotted a BBC News report about its forthcoming release, I got around to watching Flood, a British disaster flick about the inundation of the capital. Not even the usually sterling efforts of star Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting; 28 Weeks Later) could keep this determinedly mediocre movie afloat. (Sample the reviews; and join me in sympathy with whoever kept his name off the list of players at the DVD's Amazon UK listing.)

Arguably the best thing about it, as a film, is the nifty shot of Westminster awash (see above).

However, as a contribution to public discourse on flood risk, the film has possibly done a bit better. Its timeliness in confronting/exploiting one of the bogeymen of climate change has been noted, and its likelihood evaluated (The Times; BBC News Magazine). It also earned an audience of 7.2 million when reincarnated as a TV miniseries two months ago (Brand Republic). A film need not be an artistic masterwork in order to offer a useful contribution to our mental environment. I'm not qualified to do this, but it could be interesting to see an evaluation of how money spent on a movie production compares to expenditure on more orthodox means of bringing issues to public attention (public service announcements, government reports, and the like).

Meanwhile, the flooding of London as a long-term prospect, as opposed to popcorn cataclysm, appears to be trickling into the collective mind. Over at Open the Future, Jamais Cascio has posted on a series of photoshopped visualisations called Flooded London 2090, produced by Squint/Opera, a film and media production studio based in the city. (Thanks to Jake for the tip.)

"St Pauls -- A late afternoon plunge from the Whispering Gallery"
Image: Squint/Opera, Flooded London 2090
via www.jamesshaw.co.nz (->Visualisation->Flooded London)

"St Mary Woolnath -- Rich Pickings from Bank"
Image: Squint/Opera, Flooded London 2090
via www.jamesshaw.co.nz (->Visualisation->Flooded London)

"Honor Oak -- Suburban Bucolia"
Image: Squint/Opera, Flooded London 2090
via www.jamesshaw.co.nz (->Visualisation->Flooded London)

The strikingly attractive images above (disappointingly, there are just five in the set) are now being exhibited as part of the London Festival of Architecture, and so, being nearby, I made my way to the venue this afternoon to take a look.

Medcalf gallery, 38 Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell
Photo: the sceptical futuryst

(The details and background of the artwork are, of course, much better appreciated when mounted in large prints on lightboxes than onscreen.)

Outside, it's a sunny 02008; inside, an après-déluge 02090
Photo: the sceptical futuryst

From the project description:

The general scenario is set 80 or so years into the future, long after the sea levels have risen. The catastrophe side of the sea coming in has long since past [sic] and the five images are snapshots of people going about their lives, long since having adapted to the worlds [sic] new circumstance. The five scenes shown through lightboxes present London as a tranquil utopia with the architecture of the distant rat race suspended below the water.

It's good to see here what I've previously suggested, following Jim Dator, we need more of; namely, images of futures in which people are adapting responsibly and pleasantly to climate changes which we no longer have the lead-time to avoid; "promoting a range of viable responses -- various different scenarios which all assume global warming, and some of which show us thriving anyway".

Also, it strikes me that this approach could make a marvellous basis for a much larger exhibition, in London or elsewhere -- imagining alternative futures for a whole variety of urban settings, in a sort of Worth1000 challenge for professional artists. Better yet, include original photos of the current locations alongside each set of alternative visual forecasts.

Disaster scenarios are dramatically exciting, and conceptually vital to risk management; but I suspect that without a sense of their (comparatively mundane) non- or post-disaster counterparts, our best intentions will be found dead in the water.

Immaculate extinction

Another gorgeous post-people sunset at London's Tower Bridge
Image: Chris Stocker for BBC Focus #191, July 02008

"What if we all vanished overnight?" That's the question posed in the current edition of BBC Focus magazine ("The world's best science and technology monthly") in its cover story about "Earth Without Man" (which inside, is labelled with the rather more PC, less portentous "Earth Without Us"). Written by sci-fi author Stephen Baxter, the article offers, garnished with a few words about London for the British audience, a generic account of the post-human trajectory with which readers may already be familiar, if not from Alan Weisman's World Without Us, then perhaps from either of the two identically-themed TV programs that have appeared on screens so far this year.

We have visited this topic before at t.s.f. Back in January, I posted Mondolithic's imaginative renderings of New York City succumbing to the march of time in the absence of human intervention. The only distinctively British visual accompaniment to this BBC magazine story was the one on the cover (see above), but it started me wondering whether others had perhaps been produced to adapt the post-humanity idea for a local audience.

An article in the tabloid Daily Mail included the following shots...

"Washed away: Harrods, London's premier department store, rots among derelict double-decker buses in flood waters caused by the bursting of the Thames barrier"
Image: Life After People (via Daily Mail)

"Crown and out: Buckingham Palace sinks into decay"
Image: Life After People (via Daily Mail)

...which turn out to be culled from a filmmaking effort to turn this oddly popular thought experiment into a feature-length thriller.

Life After People screened on Channel 4 in the UK, but was produced for the History Channel in the US. I watched it online this week, via a low-resolution, though adequate, version archived at Google video.

I'll start with what I liked about it. It's great that the History Channel can take a sufficiently broad view of history and documentary (both of which are, often enough, pretty ponderous enterprises) to carry out quite a fanciful, extended thought experiment in prime time. It seemed that by far the majority of shots were dreamed up from nothing, and a lot of the CG visuals were pretty cool, up to a point.

But on the whole I found it an overblown and self-important excuse for a bunch of thunderous effects, more or less on a par with The Day After Tomorrow. So much sound and fury, even after the last poor player has quit the stage. Percussive action-thriller music and smarmy narration were incessant. A sample from the script, to be intoned in a gravelly American movie-preview voice: FIVE YEARS AFTER PEOPLE, THE ROADS OF THE WORLD ARE DISAPPEARING BENEATH A GREEN MAT THAT SPREADS LIKE SOME RELENTLESS MONSTER. THE ADVANCE OF NATURE KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES. The topic appeared to serve mainly as a pretext for animated sequences looking at how cities, particularly U.S. cities, and even more particularly U.S. cities with towering iconic structures that look good collapsing in slow motion from various angles, would fare. By the end of an hour and a half, frankly, it was wearing thin.

The National Geographic Channel's tilt at the same premise, Aftermath: Population Zero (which can also be found online, posted in five parts by a thoughtful netizen) is less tabloid, attempts to spend approximately equal time destroying U.S. and European capitals, and divides attention more evenly between the ecological and engineering aspects of the post-people scenario. It also doesn't feature talking heads, which in Life After People are handled with utmost cheese by zapping interviewees in and out of the frame -- see how they disappear! Playing to a traditional NatGeo strength, Aftermath also illustrates the reassertion of non-human ecology with some cleverly orchestrated predator-prey scenes.

Image: Post-something London
as imagined in Aftermath: Population Zero (National Geographic Channel)

So, what are we to make of all this?

I'm tempted to take back my earlier, perhaps too-optimistic notion that the spate of interest in post-human Earth could be seen as "positive evidence of a sort of coming of age". While this could still be the case, the way the subject is handled in these TV movies lends rather more weight to the unflattering alternative, that "we're narcissistically obsessed with our own demise".

But it's an interestingly empty demise: we all suddenly, a propos of nothing, ascend into heaven? This conceit of the impromptu disappearance of the entire human race, with everything else remaining untouched, is a telling piece of fantasy, I think. In Australia some years ago, there was a non-alcoholic beverage called Claytons, marketed as "the drink you have when you're not having a drink". Here we have Claytons eschatology: the idle contemplation of the end times that you engage in when you're not up for considering genuinely frightening possible futures. It's an apocalypse the whole family can enjoy. Velvet Revelations. An immaculate extinction.

Last week on BBC World News, I caught a report [video] highlighting the massive reliance of the U.K. economy on imported Chinese goods. The point was illustrated graphically by several shots panning across a typical home, wherein they magically zapped out all the household items originating in China. Without them, things looked pretty bare. Now, you wouldn't take that experiment as evidence that, without China, we would literally have next to nothing in our homes. Historically, things would develop elsewise; we might be doing without certain items, while making other things ourselves, or importing them from elsewhere. But the point was simply to dramatise, visually, how reliant we presently are on one exporting giant by taking its products out of the picture.

The two films in question could, similarly, be explained on the basis that they're not intended to be read literally, but simply to show, by simulating our absence, how much impact humanity has upon the world. Fair enough. But the thought experiment about what "could (however qualified) happen" is prone to being misinterpreted as "coming soon". Many futurists I know make a distinction between a forecast (tentative if-then statement) and prediction (confident assertion about what will occur), but as sensible as this may be, such distinctions tend to get lost in public fora. The Daily Mail headline introducing images produced for Life After People: "Revealed: what the world will look like when we've gone".

A counterfactual "how the world could look if humans had never existed" would presumably be equally effective for the purpose of illustrating, by subtraction, our collective impact: but by starting from the present day, the films invite being (mis)understood as a possible, or even probable, future.

The emphasis on spectacle also helps put to rest suspicions that they can be expected to substantially improve scenaric thinking. Going back to our China products example; suppose the roof had been held up by Chinese-made dry wall; the news segment might have been a lot more dramatic had the walls vanished so the house caved in. That approach isn't far off the one adopted in Life After People and Aftermath: taking an absurd premise -- instantaneous, cause-free disappearance of humans -- to its (il)logical, if spectacular, conclusion. It would be disingenuous to claim that we're merely being given an creative, accessible depiction of human impact on the world: we're also getting Armageddon Lite.

And, it's worth noting that Life After People was apparently the most successful broadcast ever for the History Channel: 5.4 million viewers watched the show in January (Washington Post).

It is not trivial, I think, to wonder about the refusal to posit a mechanism, in both films, by which the disappearance could happen. It is certainly not because we lack the means to destroy ourselves -- for evidence to the contrary, Baxter's article refers the curious to Nick Bostrum's veritable catalogue of existential threats. Of course, I understand the spirit of the experiment, that the story is not supposed to be about those threats; we are asked simply to grant the assumption and see what follows. But why should we? That elides too neatly the single most important thing about the prospect of human extinction -- that it's almost certain to be our own damn fault. And, arguably the second-most important thing about it, too -- that it would in all likelihood be neither instantaneous nor painless.

One of the possible criticisms of Children of Men, a near-future feature film praised at this blog not long ago, was that the backdrop of the story (worldwide infertility) was never explained in the film. Still, the movie worked wonderfully as a document of, and metaphor addressing, an epochal confidence crisis -- today's -- and its emotional plausibility is preserved partly because that plot mechanism, which isn't the point of the story, is deliberately denied rational scrutiny. That film unflinchingly showed how people's lives might play out under such circumstances, and it's a profoundly human piece of storytelling.

For another comparison, I'm currently reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and if you can get into the mannered prose, you find an intensely atmospheric description of what it could be like in a hellish -- drastically diminished, close to post-human(e) -- world. Children of Men and The Road both come from a kind of "last man standing" genre of apocalyptica; in contrast, I appreciate the (rapidly diminishing) novelty of the no-more-people-whatsoever approach, but I'm wondering to what kinds of useful conclusions it leads, vis-a-vis present action. Because Life After People and Aftermath entirely avoid the biggest questions they raise: Life after people why? Aftermath of what? The fact that they do so deliberately and up-front hardly makes it any less of an omission. Who, literally, could give a damn what happens to the world's landmarks 300 years, or 10,000, after the last of the landmarkers has departed? It's a matter of profound -- no, towering -- unimportance. We all disappear, without cause or human consequences, then our toys slowly fade away too. So what?

Meanwhile, the starting point of these explorations, namely, humanity suddenly ending its tenure on this planet, is -- when considered as genuine future-historic potential -- surely the ultimate tragedy in the fullest sense of both those words. By tragedy I don't mean simply "very sad occurrence" (there's plenty of room to doubt that), but the Aristotelian arc; a protagonist's dramatic reversal of fortune from triumph to downfall, brought about by a persistent characteristic that turns from strength to fatal flaw.

In other words, it's a hell of a story. These films have found a roundabout way of raising the topic in polite society, without confronting the central issue. And it's terrifically difficult, I suppose, to address such grandiose possibilities without being, or at least seeming, either pathetically self-congratulatory (the cockroaches will miss us) or misanthropic (good riddance). Yet there's an inescapable air of the masturbatory about this no-more-people genre -- as a thoughtful Washington Post article on the phenomenal popularity of the post-people line of products put it: "there's the unstated human ego at work here, navel-gazing and overstating our importance."

However much they have in common, though, these two films are not interchangeable, and they're both worth a look. One of the differences between the pair is that Aftermath, where Life After People goes for the Jerry Bruckheimer jugular, has a somewhat more meditative element to it. The concluding, salutary sentiment is as follows: "Earth is resilient. In time, it cleaned up every mess we left behind. All we had to do was get out of the way."

Hmm. What "getting out of the way" might entail -- not as a magical fait accompli, but as a voluntary process engaged over time -- could make an interesting premise for a film.

Or a civilisation.

London's burning

Last week, here in London, I went for a rather remarkable walk.

And While London Burns is an "operatic audio tour" in three acts, a self-guided, immersive audio experience of The City, a.k.a. The Square Mile, London's financial district. The story it tells is woven around the area's extravagant fossil fuel consumption; past, present and (other things being equal) future. It's told mainly through the anguished persona of a young investment manager, who starts out by showing you his place of work, and who, as you listen, quits his job in a wave of self-disgust and wanders the streets ruminating aloud on his, and our, ugly predicament. It deals with two layers; one schematic, the tangled "carbon web" wrapped around the city; and the other personal, the woman who left him, along with her own parallel career in high finance, for a remote off-the-grid commune.

The tour is a project of political art collective Platform, which "works across disciplines for social and ecological justice... combin[ing] the transformatory power of art with the tangible goals of campaigning, the rigour of in-depth research with the vision to promote alternative futures." An impressive, and resonant, undertaking. At the project website, you can download the audio files for free (thanks to Arts Council England, which puts public money to work "to get more art to more people in more places"). Then, you put them on a portable music player (iPod or similar) and make your way to the Starbucks adjacent to the underground railway station at Bank, where the journey begins.

This wasn't the first time I had taken the walk. It was on a brief stopover here in February 02007, on a quiet Sunday morning, that I did it the first time. En route to the airport, I wheeled my heavy suitcase through deserted streets and alleys, and the grim eschatological tone of the tour and its melancholy score was underlined by the emptiness of the buildings and thoroughfares along the way. The tour is generally intended to be taken during business hours, however, because at one stage you're guided indoors through the Royal Exchange Building (formerly the London Stock Exchange), now a luxury shopping centre. The other time, the building had been closed; but on this occasion, a lunchtime crowd of snappily dressed financiers sat round tables in the vaulted atrium, surrounded by top-end stores like De Beers and Cartier. Generally I found the backdrop of the teeming, oblivious hive of The City just as effective as its sombre, emptied-out weekend version. The latter condition, however, does make the tour a little bit easier to hear.

The audio walk -- which, regrettably, by its nature can't really be appreciated or grasped by an audient not on the spot -- emphasises how much things change on the surface, and how little they change underneath. There's a world-weariness about this view that's not shallow cynicism, but burdened by a deep awareness of history. I think the great achievement of the project is that the walker comes to appreciate this depth, and accompanying entanglements, much better. Along the way, you cross the line of the Great Fire of London (01666), as well as the possible future shoreline of a risen River Thames. One of the practical consequences of the constant change is disruption of the tour's route as time goes on: both a pedestrian overpass leading away from Tower 42, and the Monument which concludes the walk, are currently closed for renovations. Obviously the times for walking certain sequences do vary, and the directions were sparse enough that I accidentally strayed from the path once or twice the first go around, but I was able to hit pause and get my bearings. Another potential frustration that can pull you from the story is if your batteries run out. That happened to me ten minutes in, this time -- a charming little irony for an audio walk about unsustainable energy consumption, ha ha. I had to recharge and come back the next day.

Still, I find this rapidly developing medium, the immersive audio walk, a fantastic way to experience a place. You get a new, mind-expanding vision of the City that is afforded only by inhabiting it differently (a bit like the Situationists' dérive, but carefully constructed to place you in another man's shoes). The cocooning of the listener in her private aural environment, which might in other contexts be regretted for disconnecting people from their fellows and surroundings (armies of commuters spend their journeys either shouting into cellphones or retreating into iPod solitude), in this setting provides instead a cinematic soundtrack-to-life, an unpredictable (the first time, at least) meandering path to which you can surrender, and a thrilling sense of insider's initiation. Sensory synchronicities, both planned and unplanned, make the experience exciting, and somehow grounding. The voiceover mentions a layer of fine black dust on all the buildings about -- the accretion of miniscule particles of fossil fuel exhaust -- so you touch a finger to the handrail, and it gets coated in grime. On two occasions, during the choral refrain admonishing the audio-walker to "look up at the sky", I raised my eyes in time to catch, at precisely that moment, a jet passing overhead.

I love the contradiction that it's substantially the same experience, and yet unique in each detail, every time it is taken. The audio walk is a designed experience, the script pre-recorded, but the motion performed by you, with the improvised assistance of the location and thousands of unwitting extras. It's more unpredictable than a film, feels more labile than most live theatre, and is certainly more personal, by dint of participation, than either.

The essence of the experience is not the walk per se, but the detailed choreographing of attention in the midst of a genuinely chaotic environment. Directing the attention, cognitive and sensory, in a real place in motion, seems to make it eminently suitable for futures, which is ultimately about perceiving the present differently. This is the only audio walk I've encountered which really succeeds in heightening appreciation of the fragility, ephemerality and contingency of the present, although I see this medium as ideally suited to engendering that reflective frame of mind.*

In any case, I'd recommend this to anyone within reach of London who's interested in the forces behind climate change, or even in just the possibilities of this immersive medium. Platform is to be applauded for a daringly critical piece of public art that asks, and enables, us to survey and move through our dazzlingly, dizzyingly busy surroundings with a more inquiring gaze; it invites us not to be overwhelmed by all the things that appear to change, but to be more sensitive to the things which stubbornly do not.

On that point; yesterday, while getting updated on Platform's current work, I watched their recent home-brewed documentary Burning Capital, which is about BP (formerly British, now ostensibly "beyond", Petroleum; one of the largest energy companies in the world, headquartered in London). It's quite a technical investigation -- not in an engineering sense, but a political one -- so may not enthrall all comers, but it does explicitly ask one question implicitly posed by And While London Burns: "How long is it before government, forced by rising public pressure, changes the theoretical cost of carbon into an actual cost, and the company is forced to carry the real economic impact of climate change?" (Burning Capital, Act 3.1)

How long, indeed.


* Colleague Jake Dunagan (HRCFS) and I did a bit of research towards a possible futures-themed audio walk in Chinatown, Honolulu. As funding for the (surprisingly expensive) studio production bit proved elusive, that project morphed into a more immediately viable, but very different, multi-part FoundFutures intervention late last year. Still, with my appetite whetted thanks to that development process, the series of audio walks or tours I've taken in the past year and a half is surprising even to me: Chinatown Manhattan; the 9/11 Sonic Memorial; Wall Street; Belleville, Paris; the disappointingly dull Da Vinci Code tour at The Louvre; the eye-opening driving tour Invisible-5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I've also taken more standard key-in-a-number tours of Pearl Harbor, Stonehenge, Tate Modern (a multimedia guide on a handheld computer), and a couple of urban walks of the cheap talking-head variety that gives audio tours a bad name. The one that first alerted me to the potential of the medium, which I first took in 01998 and revisited last year, was the Alcatraz prison audio tour in San Francisco. The most fully realised urban experiences were the Soundwalk tours (Chinatown, Wall St, and Belleville), along with And While London Burns.

Fragments of a low carbon future

The UK's Forum for the Future has released a project called Low Carbon Living 2022. Its rationale:

A low carbon Britain doesn't have to mean cutbacks and sacrifice. Climate change is an enormous challenge. But if we respond in the right way, many of the changes we make could improve our quality of life.

Based on a literature review, and interviews with people campaigning for carbon reduction, they developed a series of visions -- scenario sketches depicting aspects of everyday life -- set in 02022. The selected date is, admirably, "far enough in the future for some new technologies to have become available and for progressive policies to be put in place, but similar enough to today to be recognisable".

I'm especially taken with some of the hypothetical products developed alongside the visions, and which feature throughout them -- nine new goods and services that could enable low carbon lifestyles. For instance, the Kinetica generates electrical current from body movement, to be used to power personal electronics or charge batteries. U-Grow provides equipment and training for growing produce in the small spare spaces in urban environments, and aggregates any surplus for sale to local customers.

The parting question posed under each product or service outline, to solicit public feedback, is "If this was a real service [or product], would you be interested?" This is an interesting approach, sort of a hybrid of focus-group product testing and scenario workshopping. This seems a useful way of doing long-range product planning -- and open sourcing promising elements -- for preferred futures. However, I'd be tempted to use more visual material ; some of the nine concepts are described in text only, while others have a pictorial counterpart, in the form of mocked-up advertisements, several of which appear at the top of this post. Concepts with an accompanying image appear to have attracted more feedback to date.

This seems to me a very constructive and carefully thought out project. It would be great -- though logistically difficult, perhaps -- to track whether and how these initiatives (together with others developed at the Low Carbon Living workshop) lead to development of actual products and services for a low carbon future.