One of our guys found this the other day. Really amazing sense of changing space, placement, and movement. The blurring effects are really intriguing to me. From creative agency Superbien, for some sort of mobile phone promotion (but only slightly less interesting because of it).
ENVISION : Step into the sensory box from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.
I’m about 30 pages in to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. I may just be overly involved in the link between spaces and imagination (and therefore blind to what a normal person would read), but this one looks like it’s going to be a “must” for our thinking. The main thing I’m getting so far – other than great ideas about how poetry happens – is about the imaginatively shaping work of our childhood homes. They are a sort of “first universe” for our imaginations – a place in which we learn to dream, and to which we often return in revery and thought. I see plenty of direct relation to our earlier post on Lewis’ ideas on medieval cosmos – an inhabitable universe. Both Lewis and Bachelard seem to be getting at an amazing idea: we cannot imagine and live within a void, even if it is more “real” than our value-laden experience of spaces.
In Cube terms, this type of work gives us insight into what shapes our imagination – as well as some of the how and why (embodied, inhabited, childhood spaces versus those that we experience in general). In some ways, it perhaps is a work that offers some direction in terms of large-scale film: it can’t get “thin” in terms of physicality and what James Wood calls “thisness” – the quality of particularity that we look for in fiction. At the same time, with projects like Olafur Eliasson’s, it seems equally clear that experiences of extreme simplicity (say, a monochromatic room) can still meet this criterion (I think) by virtue of their focus and sensory particularity.
This could be a great idea, or a terrible one. It’s actually kind of hard to tell the difference.
Reading bldgblog today, I was struck by images that came to mind as I thought further about the idea of an open-air planetarium, projected onto the low over-cast of London skies above Trafalgar Square. What kind of experience would that be? Amazing and inviting, perhaps (who wouldn’t like to have a window through that cloud cover to the deeps of space beyond?). I could picture a leisurely walk filled with usually invisible constellations and detailed views of deep space phenomena. These types of things would (and have, ever since humans had eyes and stayed awake past sundown) make for excellent viewing.
On the other hand, I had images of a less salutary sort come to mind as well: a complete digitization of the sky – one more source of light pollution, a buzz of projected activity always turned on whether welcome or not, a kind of pixelated graffiti painted over “boring” parts of nature. Though I’ve seen plenty of digital art that involves natural structures as part of the image (projections on mist, waterfalls, fog, etc.), I think the question I still have is in what manner nature gets to serve as inspiration, content, or medium for art.
We ought to keep exploring these types of things. My hunch is that nature will ultimately serve as our best source for thematic content for films in the Cube. Perhaps that’s too obvious – what besides nature do we have to work with? I guess what I’m driving at is that the wilderness – not just patches of grass next to bus stops – may be the place we all need to go, imaginatively speaking, for a renewal of our minds.
The other day, I was relating the experience I had last year: walking in moonlight out over cooled lava in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. My friend and I were trying to catch a glimpse of the place where the flowing, molten rock reached the ocean. It wasn’t a good night for viewing that, but that made no difference to us, because of what we did find: ourselves at the edge of the newly-formed land (you know, the part we’d been warned not to stand on) looking out at the largest waves we’d ever seen, 60 or 70 feet from trough to crest, almost silently rolling to the top of the cliffs – I say silent, but I mean something more like sublime; with a sound of elements moving the earth, not of splashing. I’m not sure that the earth has ever felt so real to me as for those glorious minutes when we couldn’t make ourselves move away from the sight and feel of danger.
I’m not so much a Hemingway disciple as to think of all this as man versus nature, nor so much a hippie to think of nature as a gentle, caring mother. Something else was happening. And I think that something else – the inexhaustible otherness, yet present to my senses – was a sacramental gift; but no less dangerous as such. This is different than a projection which is under our control (or simply a visual annoyance to the uninterested). Could something like this experience be brought inside a theater?
I had the pleasure last week of attending a lecture by scholar Michael Ward. He was talking about his new book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008). I haven’t read it yet, but have it sitting on my desk next to me, ready to go. The gist of the book is that the Lewis’ Narnia series is, in fact, organized around the classical/medieval cosmological model of the heavens – with the planets, sun and moon all exerting their own, peculiar “influence” over the content of each book, and the rest of the symbolism involved therein. That description may be, to you, one drawn out reason for a yawn, but I find it quite intriguing – particularly since no one has figured this out before, though it was there in plain sight. Dr. Ward spoke of Lewis’ method as “transferred classicism”: taking classical figures, symbolism, and, in this case astrological and cosmological models in order to tell a story about something quite different (a Christ-like salvation history in another world).
I’ve spent quite a bit of my own time and thought considering Lewis’ obsession with medieval cosmology – partly as it comes out in his Ransom Trilogy and partly in his scholarly writings on medieval and Renaissance literature (especially The Discarded Image). The interesting point Lewis continually brings out, both as a scholar and a fiction writer, is that, while not “accurate”, the medieval model of the universe was at least imaginatively engaging. Unlike the boundless void which comes to mind when we hear “space”, Lewis claims the medieval model was, clearly, a real place – vast, yet also comprehensible and meaningful. More contemporary theories of cosmology also tend to place emphasis on inter-connectedness and beauty, but the modernist damage is mostly done. Among other things, our human imagination (at least in places dominated by technological priority and scientism) is hopelessly alone and disconnected in a sea of empty space. That may be “deep” existentially speaking, but it doesn’t ultimately take you anywhere (unless you love slogging through H. P. Lovecraft novels – which some friends of mine do, to be honest).
One way or another, I think one key inspiration from Lewis’ work is that it is possible (and beneficial) to develop stories in such a way that their thematic structure supports their imaginative accessibility while remaining mostly invisible (indeed, invisible to scholars for decades). This, I believe, is different than pulling off a good illusion.
As for the Cube, I find all sorts of connections here. For one, the point that our imaginations reflect the universe in which we believe we live. This can be illusory or over-literal – to the point that we miss deeper meanings in scientific learning. One purpose of the original visions for the Cube was as a place where people’s view of the universe became expanded – but not toward the expanse of nothingness. Rather, to become more real, full, visibly beautiful, enjoyable, and thoroughly livable. That may sound entirely abstract, but the idea is rather in the opposite direction: to expound upon the mystery of the universe in a meaningful way rather than a “shock and awe” trip to the edge of a black hole (which doesn’t sound too bad as a visual story – just not the whole story).
Remember the much-anticipated experience of stepping into a planetarium to watch the mysteries of the universe unfold with the rest of your whole 4th grade class? If that was in the 80s (as it was for me), the harsh reality of an underwhelming stumble through a second-rate animated solar system probably shook your astronautical aspirations to their fragile core. Well, it’s the 00s (?) and planetariums are movin’ on up. Maximum PC has an article about a good one, the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (which, coincidentally, recently underwent a remodel from notable architect Renzo Piano).
In imagining the Cube, it’s hard not to think of this type of visual experience (the space travel one). Perhaps of most relevance, the CAS project shows that digital rendering and display technology keeps on moving in the right direction (for us anyway).
