Balloon Play from Haemi Yoon on Vimeo.

In ‘The Vatican to Vegas,’ his study of the architectural illusion from 1580 to the Electronic Baroque of today’s building structures including Las Vegas casinos, Norman Klein articulates how the special effects of scripted spaces could be related to animation-247. He offers an idea of how animation was a Baroque form of narrative and explains the way in which its story is built up from the instances when ‘illusion’ and the ‘real’ are trapped inside the same gesture. This film is done by Oskar Fischinger, a great animator that created abstract animations. 

Our surrounding structures having the aspects of a digital environment would mean that we would experience continuos moments when both the illusion and the real are joined. As a result, simulation of the digital experiences would be achieved in a physical environment. In much the same way, even the patterns created by our spatial practice could have more potential than merely adding textures to the space that our body occupies. For generations, many have been deeply interested in how people’s spatial practice influenced the space. 

Michel de Certeau’s work, ‘The Practice of Everyday Life,’ introduces an idea of how an operation in space, such as walking in the city could change the cityscape by making traces of figures that could be realized as a forest of gestures. Equally, the perception of understanding people’s movement as part of the space could be experienced through film and animation that consists of the simultaneous transfiguration of the body and space. In some scenes of ‘Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance,’ a film directed by Godfrey Reggio, the movements of cars, shopping carts, and other practices in modern life are accelerated allowing the viewers to see the world changing its shape through the spatial texture created by people’s behavior. 

Oskar Schlemmer, artist architect and Bauhaus master, based his work of art on the idea of merging the human body with the space it occupied and defined-227. He used costumes as a vehicle to re-characterize the body as a space making being-231. By using the distinct motion patterns of the body and the costume, he explored how architecture, space and the occupiers were all linked. 

In very much the same way Schlemmer used costume to script an open relationship between body and space, technology and computation can possibly be theatrical elements that amplifies the notion of human beings being part of the spatial system. In his essay, Marshall McLuhan described an idea of media and technology being extensions of the human body-6. If the representation of everyday practices and space are inextricably interlinked as many theorists and artists have illustrated, people’s intuitive interaction with technology integrated in space could generate almost infinite variety of spatial relations. The mode of producing metaphors in space used to be constrained by the memories tied into a controlled environment where the architecture establishes the rules of people’s operations, whereas in a physical environment that has aspects of digital world, space would be scripted by the people perhaps through their gestures, occupancy and interactions with objects.

My friend from MDP

Hunter Sebresos & his brother in law, Ben Wing’s Project

Link to the original video

Fireflies, I used to catch them and have them in my room. It would be interesting to learn how they communicate with one another.

Link to the original

I was amazed by this footage. This is a video that shows bees using gestures to explain a location. It is really sad that bees are dying.

Gesture Study

Luke Johnson, Thesis Year(Fall 09)

The Hands