Reinventing Cities

1: take smoke, makes water - 100m2



2: dynamic transformation in border condition - pyo arquitectos



3: living the outsite - rita topa



4: performative landscapes - david newton



5: infrastructural armature - fletcher studio

COMBO: collaboration animation by Blu and David Ellis

Xian 1

SVA "Unseen realities" Exhibition

SIETCH NEVADA

Sectional perspective of underground city

View of the urban life among the water bank canals

Site plan

Plan, above ground (left) and below ground (right)

Site model

Detail of site model

Via http://matsysdesign.com/

Year: 2009
Location: 37°46′20.10″N, 117°31′57.38″W
Exhibition: Out of Water | innovative technologies in arid climates at the University of Toronto

Description: In Frank Herbert’s famous1965 novel Dune, he describes a planet that has undergone nearly complete desertification. Dune has been called the “first planetary ecology novel” and forecasts a dystopian world without water. The few remaining inhabitants have secluded themselves from their harsh environment in what could be called subterranean oasises. Far from idyllic, these havens, known as sietch, are essentially underground water storage banks. Water is wealth in this alternate reality. It is preciously conserved, rationed with strict authority, and secretly hidden and protected.

Although this science fiction novel sounded alien in 1965, the concept of a water-poor world is quickly becoming a reality, especially in the American Southwest. Lured by cheap land and the promise of endless water via the powerful Colorado River, millions have made this area their home. However, the Colorado River has been desiccated by both heavy agricultural use and global warming to the point that it now ends in an intermittent trickle in Baja California. Towns that once relied on the river for water have increasingly begun to create underground water banks for use in emergency drought conditions. However, as droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, these water banks will become more than simply emergency precautions.

Sietch Nevada projects waterbanking as the fundamental factor in future urban infrastructure in the American Southwest. Sietch Nevada is an urban prototype that makes the storage, use, and collection of water essential to the form and performance of urban life. Inverting the stereotypical Southwest urban patterns of dispersed programs open to the sky, the Sietch is a dense, underground community. A network of storage canals is covered with undulating residential and commercial structures. These canals connect the city with vast aquifers deep underground and provide transportation as well as agricultural irrigation. The caverns brim with dense, urban life: an underground Venice. Cellular in form, these structures constitute a new neighborhood typology that mediates between the subterranean urban network and the surface level activities of water harvesting, energy generation, and urban agriculture and aquaculture. However, the Sietch is also a bunker-like fortress preparing for the inevitable wars over water in the region.

Credit: Andrew Kudless (Design), Nenad Katic (Visualization), Tan Nguyen, Pia-Jacqlyn Malinis, Jafe Meltesen-Lee, Ben (Model)

倪安东 - 好久不见

In one of my previous entry i featured this song by Eason. This version is by an american which is amazingly more touching.

Mon Ami

It has been a long time since I last blogged due to my much-dreaded affair with dissertation. Wednesdays are good days to blog especially after my Akido trainings which leaves me with great clarity of mind to write about things. But anyway, blogging is given a pretty low importance in consideration of other priorities:

1) Last year to have fun
2) Travel (on going)
3) Hang out with bro, parents and friends
4) Swim (on going)
5) Watch movies (on going)
6) Sort my 123412341234 travel photos (in progress)
7) Learning Akido (in progress)
8) Learning how to drive a boat (done!)
9) Learn diving (in progress)
10) Tennis
11) Advance my guitar skills
12) Learn piano
13) Learn Rhino (in progress)
14) Learn Maxwell
15) Dissertation (good riddance)
16) Pursue film interest (in progress)
17) Thesis research (in progress)
18) Play computer games (on going)
19) Make a new notebook and photo frame
20) Update portfolio
21) Read all my books
22) Daydreaming while staring at the clouds float pass my window
23) Blog

However, getting involved with nuSTUDIOS film school activities recently got me all fired up with my long passion for film-making and I decided to dig out all my pass works to smile geekily at myself while viewing them.

Mon Ami is a short story I did with my co-director YZ in 2001 after my JC examination for VJC. It was my first time trying with the narrative since usually I am more concerned with cinematography due to my AEP training. The result was pretty amateurish given that the whole thing was shot without a script and everything was impromptu. We only had a general idea that it would be a romantic comedy about a girl who had confidence issues in finding her dreams as an actress, and her magical relationship with her imaginary friend. The shooting took 3 days with another 3 days of editing and even thou our friends had no experience in theatrics, they were game enough to give acting a try. The whole experience was great fun and to top it off, we won an outstanding award for the Nationals schools video competition even thou we failed to clear the copyrighted music.

Mon Ami from tefallenangel on Vimeo.

Dead

Have you ever tried staring intensively at something inert, staring so hard that you hope that by that act of staring and giving it attention and meaning, it comes to life, it moves, it responds to that transference of vitality through the window of the soul. And you are constantly checking on it just to catch the possibility of any signs of change, or of movement. But in the end, even with all that effort and meaningless hope, it is none of the less still dead.

Life in the City-State 1999

“Life in the City-state” is a video installation I did for my graduation from the Art Elective Program when I was in Chinese High School in 1999. I did not manage to learn much in that 4 years of art education, accept film making skills, which I find great pleasure in.



The installation is trying to depict the despondency and degeneration of life in Singapore trapped in the artifice of its own construct, peeling apart its superficial beauty and happiness to reveal the true hollowness within. The set is a dark room pretty much like the atmosphere shown in the picture where a plaster sculpture of me is glued to the television representing the inability of the being to extract himself from the machine of consumption and of being consumed while slowing rotting away with time.

The work is created in the Art block of the above picture, an almost perfectly rectangular double storey enclosure where all sorts of amusing creative antics take place within. I spent many nights there in the Art block working alone sanding my sculpture and editing the video.

The whole video is taken on a professional JVC camera like that in the picture but I can’t remember exactly what was the model (It was like 11 yrs ago). As it uses Super VHS tapes, my work was destroyed 3 times towards the examination date due to a series of unfortunate “tape stuck in lousy video playback device” events. Luckily, by then I decided to go with my instincts, shoot with my feelings, and forgo content, which made me do well for my finals.

Editing then was pretty interesting and extremely taxing coz the world was using analogue technology then. There was no adobe premier or final cut pro, and internet was just introduced to Singapore 2 yrs before. To edit the video, I had to do some extremely complicated programming with all the dials and tv screens, set a long series of commands, hit the big red REC button and pray that nothing goes wrong. Since everything is done in real time, and I made many mistakes, I had to clock many hours in the editing suite while my peers are happily playing magic cards back in the common room.

The plaster component is the 2nd part of my installation besides my video. I had to cast a couple of life-size plaster sculpture of myself which was pretty amusing. I first learnt to cast and shape a series of my hands, a skull and then finally my full body. The full body process takes about a day, where my good friend JT will wrap plaster bandages from my toes up to my head, leaving only 2 holes for breathing. Its hot, strenuous and stuffy as I have to bear the weight of the plaster while in some preconceived pose. I did not have the luxury of that many helpers as seen from this picture when all my friends are busy with their own final year work. Once my body went numb from cold and I just collapsed flat on my face (you can’t move your body as they are under solid cast) and wasted JT’s whole day of work. The drying process takes about 3 hours and JT will give me a free “waxing session” by splitting my cast in two, right at the sides. After which I glued the 2 sides of “me” together, apply more plaster, and sand them to perfection which takes about 3 months. It was such a memorable process doing the whole installation from the filming to the editing and human casting. We often joke that the various casts of me can be found at different places of the Art block in the morning, spinning of supernatural tales. Those days were truly of simple friendships and companionship. Till now after 10 years the AEP peeps still often meet up to dine and stay over :)