"The Passing (1991)," by Bill Viola, is a fifty-four minute video piece shot in black and white. Eventhough a broken narrative and somewhat stream of conscious film, its themes are crystal clear. "The Passing is a personal response to the spiritual extremes of birth and death in the family," Bill Viola explains. He is referring to the birth of his son and death of his mother (to whom the film is dedicated), both of which occured in the four years prior to the making of this film.

The film opens up with a shot of complete darkeness. Slowly lights begin to twinkle and shine through the black nothingness as the camera begins to pull out. After a few moments the the grainy videotape footage begins to reveal what appears to be clouds in the night sky. The shot then fades into a close up of a man's face, specifically his blinking eye, laying horizontal. Viola later elaborates on this scene, frequently returning to a man (Viola himself) being awakened by his unsettling dreams and struggling to sleep through the night. The third shot of the film shows a figure suspened in water, clothes swaying ( a visual theme commonly used by Viola). We then emerge from the water as the camera follows Viola's son from behind as he happily runs from the ocean down the shore. The camera is positioned low--at the hight of the infant child, creating an intersting, almost voyeuristic perspective.

The rest of the film continues to juxtapose the human body with the natural world, exploring the meaning of life and our relationship with the universe. Bill Viola uses transitions and plays with the lights and shadows to convey the dreamlike imagery in "The Passing." The distressed man tosses and turns in bed, as he dreams of wandering in vast desert landscapes and being stranded in ominous bodies of water, occasionaly waking to check the clock or drink a glass of water. The only audio in the film is a loud ambient sound and distorted heavy breathing.

"The Passing" is about lonliness and spirituality. It is about life, death and everything in between.

According to the Roman Operating System there are four main elements that you will need to understand for the building, proliferation and networking of a city:
1. The city is comprised of standardized parts arranged on a matrix. These parts are the standard equiptment included in the container of each city and are easily identifiable.
2. The city is organized according to a series of general principles which are socially, culturally and politically determined, and in most cases are manifested in clear architectural and urban examples.
3. The city is the relationship of constantly chnaging flows superimposed onto a generic template.
4. You will have the ability to customize your city according to local topographical, climactic or cultural conditions.

For all its apparent complexity, once you know the rules, a city is easy to build.

--Taken from Mutations by the Harvard Project On The City--

In the essay Telegram From Nowhere, Mckenzie Wark discusses the issues of globalization and how it is effecting the privacy of individuals. She begins by defining globalization as "the struggle between metropolitan centers to distort the growth of contact between people to benefit themselves." Essentially history is the progress of globalization. History is about space, not time. Wark goes on to assert that the only thing that has chnaged over time is the speed of globalization. She notes the invention of the telegraph as the single most important communication revolution. Since then, information has traveled faster than humans, goods or armies. The telegraph marks the beginning of the end so to speak.

It marked the end of architecture in the classic sense that building are used for enclosure--a boundary in which things can be rationally ordered. Today, with so much information travleing in and out of the home, office, etc., it is impossible to monitor all of it. Architetcure is no longer about privacy. It simply holds ones personal posessions and keep you dry from the rain.

So how can this information be controlled? Telethesia, or "perception at a distance," makes possible, reason without enclosure. It enables the monitoring of movement, and things while they move. In a sense, Wark says, "the communication engineers have become the architects."

http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/oan/

This was briefly mentioned in an article in the NY Times today.

It is a database of public-domain architectural designs
intended for use by disaster victims & people in impoverished countries.

The website's scheduled launch date is March 8th,
and it should be interesting to watch its development
as designs are contributed over the upcoming weeks.

I think it has the potential to become a powerful collaboration tool,
as well as a great new medium for distributing ideas about architecture
over the web.

The Medium Is The Massage: An Inventory Of Effects, was published in 1967 as somwhat of an addendum to McLuhans seminal, essay, The Medium Is The Message. Much like the documentary on the media ecologist, the 160 page experimental book is a, "collide-o-scopic journey through the Marshal Mcluhan looking glass."

The book was created by McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore. It is somewhat of a collage style pamphlet, with text dispersed and superimposed throughout, intertwined with the obscure imagery. Although more or a poetic and esoteric work of art, The Medium Is The Message is a brilliant philosophical work. More so, the book reveals frightening insight into mass media, consumer goods, the press, advertising, and the arts because it was written nearly twenty years before the conception of the internet. Sometimes deamed as a prophet, Marshal McLuhans studies must have seemed incomprehensible to readers during his career. Nearly five decades later, his observations are more accurate and remarkably clear then ever.