Visualising relations, Part II
Processes, transitions and living space
Read visualising relations Part I here.
(I want to thank my colleagues in the Visualising Transitions research group in the School of Design at UTS, Anne Burdick, Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic, Abby Mellick-Lopes, Kate Sweetapple and Cameron Tonkinwise for inspiring this piece of thinking. Thanks also to Chris Gaul and Rachael Wakefield-Rann for insightful examples and discussions.)
In this article, I’m going to discuss some thought-provoking illustrations of processes and living spaces. At the outset, I need to own up to something: my massive dearth of knowledge regarding the history and contemporary practice of architectural drawing, which seems very relevant here. Likewise, though to a lesser extent, the discipline of visual communication. The examples I choose are motley, such is the nature of my undisciplined reading and research habits.
1. Herb Greene’s collages
I got to Herb Greene via a fleeting reference made to his book Painting the Mental Continuum (2003) in Steven Meyer’s enduringly brilliant Introduction to the journal Configurations Special Issue on Alfred North Whitehead: Whitehead Now.
With reference to Greene, Meyer writes about a black-and-white photograph taken from Picture History of World War Two, which shows a (French) man in a crowd on the verge of tears. When Greene first encountered the photograph he was drawn to it for some inexplicable reason. He later discovered that the image was not in fact a still image as he had thought, but a frame edited from a film. Meyer writes, with reference to Greene:
In the case of this photograph that is not one, ‘the surprising angle
of the camera’ — due, as it turns out, to the fact that the instrument
actually processing the data is a motion camera — ‘suggests that
physical events exist in geometrical relationships beyond our habitual
assumptions’ (Meyer 2005, 13).
All of this is a long route to saying I ended up buying Greene’s book. His collages and accompanying Whiteheadian exegesis have since been tangible examples I’ve used for showing what the world looks like experienced as a process — not the clear and distinct perception we experience when distinguishing objects from ourselves and each other in a visual field, but the obscured mental, physiological and emotional processing between mind-body and world, which enables the experiencing of objects as discrete entities.
The defining visual feature of Greene’s collages is the presence of reference images — either collaged photographs or his own painted scenes that directly reference other images, often paintings — and the blurring and flowing grades of abstraction that illustrate those images being experienced as process. The reference image is a stone dropped into the water of Greene’s imagination, enlivened by his painting practice. But if I want to be Whiteheadian about this analogy, I need to add this modification:
A thought is a tremendous mode of excitement. Like a stone thrown into a pond it disturbs the whole surface of our being. But this image is inadequate. For we should conceive the ripples as effective in the creation of the plunge of the stone into the water. The ripples release the thought, and the thought augments and distorts the ripples. In order to understand the essence of thought we must study its relation to the ripples amid which it emerges. (Whitehead 1966, 50)
It’s a slightly different context, however, understanding the relation between Greene’s collages and the reference images from which he draws as defined by origin and response misses the “ripples” that drew the artist to the image in the first place. Inspiration and response is only one frame by which to understand the event of these paintings.
Have a look at his website for examples of Greene’s collages.
In Painting The Mental Continuum (2003), Greene describes his project as follows:
I have been influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, whose theory of events enables us to break down our interactions with an image into details, parts, and wholes that span the feelings, ideas, and the incredible variety of contexts and circumlocutions of our response. For example, after transferring an image to canvas I surround and overpaint it with a visual commentary, an organized rumination stemming from details, parts, and wholes that respond to what seems to me some of its important forms and messages. (2003, 14)
Greene works aren’t diagrams, of course, but they do indicate what many diagrams miss when they render the world according to a metaphysics that regards discrete, static objects, entities as primary, rather than processes.
It’s readily imaginable how the aesthetic and conceptual principles used in and expressed through Greene’s work might be transferable to the multi-level perspective diagram to which I referred in Part I. For example, the different events associated with the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles which Geels discusses here, might be the inputs transferred to a ‘canvas’ that a ‘Greene-machine’ (or rather, a ‘Greene organism’), visualises: “an organized rumination stemming from details, parts, and wholes that respond to what seems to me some of its important forms and messages”. This would be a “mash-up” systems and transitions illustration of the kind discussed here.
2. Datamoshing
Ray Tintori
It was a while back now, but I remember I used Chairlift’s music video for ‘Evident Utensil’ to exemplify Whitehead’s theory of perception at a seminar in the Writing and Society Research Centre where I did my PhD. I was meant to be writing about W.G. Sebald’s prose fiction, but got caught up in the Whiteheadian turn of the early 2000s and ended up writing a PhD thesis that was a Whiteheadian reading of Sebald — way too ambitious for my abilities.
Data-moshing is still, I would argue, a useful way to exemplify the same thing evident in Greene’s collages. Namely, the hidden machinery of our body-minds as they process transitions between different events (Meyer describes it as “whirring machinery” [2005, 14]) — or, for that matter, as I am arguing here, events that are separated in space-time by more multitudinous and diverse relations.
I’m not going to attempt to explain how data-moshing works technically, but as a visual example, it shows different scenes or frames inhabiting or temporarily working beneath the existing frame, before becoming the new frame or scene in focus. Data-moshing can in this sense show how something in the present is still influenced by the very recent past, which remains ‘there’ while not being visible as such. In a way like Greene’s reference images, the previous scene becomes “overpainted” with the next scene that appears to warp its features, which in turn is “overpainted” by the next, so there’s a cumulative residue of at least three different transitions.
This technique might be a little more clunky for visualising something like the century long transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, or the electrification of living spaces, or the pedestrianisation of urban centres. The aesthetic and conceptual principle would be: that scenes or cities or living spaces can’t jump-cut from one (in the past) to the another (in the future), but each have to act for a while through the residual visual ‘infrastructure’ of the preceding example, wearing it temporarily like a kind of skin that then disintegrates into the animated parts and wholes of a new reality. The aim would be to achieve something similar to Richard McGuire’s Here, which shows floating frames that refer to other periods in time overlaying living spaces in the ‘present’ — though in this instance moving images would be used rather than illustrations.
3. Michail Rybakov’s illustrations
I came across Michail Rybakov’s neural-style block diagrams looking for illustrations of soil porosity. As Rybakov notes on his website, block diagrams are common in the geological sciences, however, they often lack “ any kind of a sensible way to embed processes that happen outside of the cut out piece of earth — the circulation of water, the circulation of life forms, human influence, changes over time — all that has to be added in some stupid way, with arrows and explanations” (Rybakov). Additionally, Rybakov observed a trend in the tone of scientific illustrations towards greater abstraction and less visual character.
In response, he used a “neural style transfer algorithm” to create a series of block diagrams inspired by 19th century German zoologist, philosopher and illustrator Ernst Haeckel. In comparison to conventional block diagrams, Rybakov’s illustrations show a landscape animated by interwoven pores which appear to stretch the landscape and make it more dynamic.
Reflecting on his efforts, Rybakov writes:
We are conditioned to look for meaning in scientific illustrations. While the meaning is lost through the process of neural style transfer, the illustration gains a lot of visual complexity. As viewers we may sense a deep cross-interlocking between the animal and its environment, but we do not get the chance to actually understand the specifics of their relationships.
Some of his illustrations are more successful than others. In the best examples, the style of the illustration completely reconfigures the landscape as a whole, rather than just working as a striking decorative element, coating a standard block diagram. The best example, from my perspective, has taken visual references from Haeckel’s illustration of an octopus. The diagram appears to take the form of an octopus compressed into a vague block-like shape, though with bulging bubbles extending out, which offer perspectives on specific landscape features or ‘micro-worlds’, in the style of some block diagrams.
This example maps onto Geels’ MLP diagram to some degree, with the features of ‘landscape’ and ‘niche’ clearly evident. Though Rybakov’s illustrations manage to convey the sense that the landscape is a texture of niches, which warp and reconfigure in seemingly random ways. So the landscape is in a sense a nest, though perhaps not of the hierarchical kind. The landscape might be the largest level in a sense, however, the recursive quality of the illustrative style makes it clear that many other perspectives might be occupied to reconfigure what appears to be the dominant perspective. The abstract line diagram used by Geels’ and other MLP researchers doesn’t afford this sensibility as explicitly.
4. Photogrammetry in Fight Club
As noted by Stephen Prince in Digital Effects in Cinema, “photogrammetry is a method of extracting the 3D structure of a scene from 2D images”:
Lines of sight by the cameras in the photographs are triangulated to recover the underlying dimensional structure. Lighting information can be recovered as well, enabling digital modelers to simulate highlights and shadowing on the buildings in ways consistent with how light would be distributed in the actual location. (2011, 174)
There’s a curious congruence here with the image of the Frenchman discussed by Meyer and Greene: extracting or apprehending a sense of further dimensionality from a 2D images.
Like all techniques, photogrammetry is to a large extent only as good as the person, team or organisation putting it to use. David Fincher and the visual effects team at BUF have been at the cutting edge for decades in this regard. Concerning visualisations of living space in particular, the scenes involving the narrator’s apartment in Fight Club make use of photogrammetry to create a sense of perspective that captures the activity of an empty apartment (leaking gas and electricity = potential explosion). You can see it in this clip from 55s. First the focalisation draws us into the stove top, circling the gas burner like a hovering helicopter. Then it cuts and the next apartment shot shows a perspective tracking backwards from underneath the fridge, along the rippled surface of the kitchen floor. We cut back to the burners, and this time float upwards to behind the fridge, and then down along the cooling elements to the base, to the fridge compressor, which then ignites the escaped gas and the apartment explodes.
The distance between the camera and the objects, spaces and surfaces bought into focus is all important here. It simultaneously seems like a close up and a landscape view. The movement of camera knits everything together to suggest a sense of typically inconspicuous relatedness. Things that most perspectives render inconsequential are thereby transformed into relationship-generating phenomena of consequence: the invisible networks of electricity and gas, the gaseous composition of the apartment space itself, the surface of the floor, the space behind the fridge, and (in another shot) inside the rubbish bin.
The use of the technique is a reminder how so many landscapes and perspectives remain obscured when the abstractions on which we habitually rely in our perceptual experience aren’t extended through technology — or indeed through other less-tangible practices of perceptual training. So much is neglected when the stock scenery and action of talking humans dictates the perspectives, particularly the flows of energy that compose modern living space as we have come to know it. The explosion scene in Fight Club shows how the composition of a landscape is contingent on perspective. Perhaps it can be read as a reminder that the biggest landscape in the world is the cumulative space enfolded inside apartments?
5. Mousho’s interior illustrations
I know very little about the Japanese artist Mousho apart from the fact that they do remarkable illustrations of the insides of apartment blocks. The most striking thing about the images, apart from the level of skill, is the sense of interior space being filled: with objects, activity, with more spaces being created within the one space. Unlike most architectural drawings, human activity is shown to be the primary space-creating force. Related but discrete spaces are stacked on and within each other, people create zones of activity just by sitting of surfaces or forming relationships with objects.
Architectural renderings often depict human activity taking place in a transparent, smooth, bright and clean utopian space. The enduring sense that this is what lived in space actually looks like is perhaps the most striking about Mousho’s illustrations in this regard: the building and its rooms are opaque and busy through layered appropriation, reconfiguration and disturbance. This is a genuinely use-centric, as opposed to innovation-centric characterisation of space.
These illustrations are the most compelling visual renderings of Sloterdijk’s foams that I’ve witnessed, far more compelling than the architectural cross-sections and elevations of empty metabolist buildings that are often used as examples. Part of Sloterdijk’s argument in Foams (2016) is that the apartment is “at once stage and cave” where a “self-care cycle” is performed, which might include “a morning grooming session consisting of emptyings, washings, acts of cosmetic self-attention and clothings”. People are connected in such spaces in ambivalent ways: they share walls, electricity, air, sonic space, light, they are contactable through media, and yet the living space also functions as a way to disconnect and form what Sloterdijk describes as “inter-autistic space”. He describes the “anti-silentium” routine of the news breakfast, nutritional and gastric activities, cleaning, sex, getting dressed, immersions in celebrity culture and much more — looking after children, not so much, his archetypal apartment dweller is described to highlight the peculiarly modern phenomenon of a life removed from bonds associated with family, geography and reproduction. I discuss this aspect of Foams at length with my colleague here. In short, he gives an hyperbolic, archetypal account of human apartment dwelling practices in wealthy democracies — though increasingly much more of the world.
Mousho doesn’t draw processes as such, nor complex and extended events of socio-technical change. The illustrations are articulations of dwelling space as formed by practices. The apartment is the template, but you could use a landscape as a spatial metaphor for time, and instead of primarily extending upwards, the space forming activity of humans and things could extend in all directions. The key aesthetic principle is that each thing or event depicted would need to be shown creating multiple different niches as it reconfigures and is reconfigured by human activity, which also configures the landscape.
But I won’t be doing this illustration, maybe Mousho, please, can you try visualising this?
In Part III I’ll discuss some of the practical challenges associated with visualising living space as part of complex sets of relations.
List of works cited
Geels, F. W. (2005). The dynamics of transitions in socio-technical systems: a multi-level analysis of the transition pathway from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles (1860–1930). Technology analysis & strategic management, 17(4), 445–476.
Greene, Herb. Painting The Mental Continuum: Perception and Meaning in The Making. Berkeley: Berkeley Hill Books, 2003. Print.
Meyer, S. (2005) Introduction. In Meyer, S. and Wilson, E eds. “Special Issue: Whitehead Now.” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 13(1), 1–33.
Prince, S. (2011). Digital Visual Effects in Cinema. Rutgers University Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (2016). Spheres Volume III: Foams, W. Hoban (trans.), Los Angelas: Semiotext(e).
Whitehead, A. N. (1966). Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press.
