At Lines and Nodes, the day-long conference and weekend-long film series that began today at NYU, our discussion of the aesthetic dimensions of extraction and infrastructure began with Finn Brunton’s recognition of the “infrastructural tracking shot.” In the strange sort of material aesthetic Johnny Mnemonic (1995) deploys for its designs of the digital, Brunton finds an exemplar for exactly this kind of maneuver.
Despite its famous cover featuring the Battersea Power Station, the infrastructural analysis performed in Animals (1977) is more closely attuned to the structural emanations of the beasts themselves.
In the video, Clark stands in for Metropolis’ automaton, complete with mechanized movements — all geometric lines and robotic stare. But where Lang’s world is all moody black-and-white, Clark and Moya paint a surreal, pastel-hued future soundtracked by St. Vincent’s funky, horn-infused dancey track.
What do you do as an architect living in a country that sets limits on and penalties for architectural design? …During the Cold War, the brave and inventive architects of the Soviet Union did not cease to advance their cause. They continued to explore their ideas in several ways, including one very simple but dangerous method: they drew what they couldn’t build, and thus invented paper architecture.
Every life is a series of choices. Some are large, and some are small. And if logistics is the science of detail, as Jomini wrote, every life must play out as an experiment for which the outcome can never be analyzed. The details build towards a future that stands as the terrible object of an uncertain construction, wrought by every decision of existence.
Long before humanity had reached that closest object of our celestial imagination, we’d already imagined ways of getting there. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) offers the mighty cannon as the most efficient means of long distance travel, lunar locomotion which evokes a spatial simplicity not well realized in the harsh reality of the complex mathematics for practical travel outside of our atmosphere.
In the drought plagued world of Tank Girl (the 1995 film, inspired by the British comic) water is literally power—the imagination of utilitarian monopoly transcending its expected social and political limitations.
The Working Group contribution to the TIPCC’s First Assessment Report (AR1) considers cumulative evidence of climate change based on many independent scientific analyses from observations of the climate system, paleoclimate archives, theoretical studies of climate processes and simulations using climate models. It represents a first concerted attempt to address the possible long term effects on the Tatooine geological and biodiversity systems, particularly as it pertains to the current unregulated practice of water mining.
