I have been working on organizing and curating this conference and exhibition…

Cambridge Talks is an annual symposium organized by the PhD Program in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Harvard University that brings together junior and senior scholars to engage in an interdisciplinary exchange on critical themes in architectural discourse and urban studies.

This year, the topic for Cambridge Talks III will be “Mediated Space.” With media technologies embedded ever-deeper into architecture, the city and everyday life, a rigorous historiography of media’s relationship to space has become a burning issue. Under the radar of the dominant discourses on media that are fueled by technological fetishism and determinism, an innovative and rapidly evolving body of scholarship has evolved. The work of these scholars has crossed disciplinary boundaries to situate architecture and urbanism within new histories of spatial perception and kineaesthetics, the contingencies of the human sensorium, 19th-century optical devices and early cinema, sound technologies, and an expanded conception of cartography. Cambridge Talks III aims to channel this interdisciplinary momentum by providing a forum for the presentation and debate of vital new work.

Providing a very nice conclusion to the project, a new Yellow Arrow website has finally arrived. You can browse all arrows placed around the world through the new Google Map interface or dip in deep through the new YA archive on Flickr.

Just finished teaching “Critical Urban Media Arts: An Experimental Workshop in Urban Research, Mapping and Representation” with Brian at Columbia University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The course was presented by the school’s Spatial Information Design Lab and resulted in Periplurban, an experiential urban dictionary.

Recently completed my paper “A Filmic Map of Moscow: Traveling through Mikhail Kaufman’s City Symphony Moscow” for Yuri Tsivian’s excellent course “Dziga Vertov and His Time: Left-Wing Art, Avant-Garde Filmmaking, Radical Politics.”

Recently completely my paper “Towards a Synaesthetic Transparency: Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair as a Walk Between Acousticd, Temporal and Ontological Spaces” 

This paper was written for Eve Blau’s fantastic course “Transparency.”

Listen to two excerpts from the walk audio:

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About

The New Factographers is a evolving network of Boston-based sonic bricoleurs, moving image interventionists, experimental documentarians, urban dramaturges and critical theorists working across various media to re-interpret the particularity of place. The name is inspired by a strain of the 1920s Russian avant-garde.

Projects

NF01  :: Union Square (The Chirping Sidewalk) is the first in this series of events using the platform of the Boston bar to create immersive audio, visual, and socio-sculptural installations about local neighborhoods and urbanism internationally. This initial experiment focuses upon the Union Square neighborhood of Somerville. For one evening, the many flat screens of Toast Lounge will be transformed with a montage of short videos portraying the details of this historic crossroads intermixed with footage from cities around the world. Sonically, bar-goers will be drawn into a series of local soundscapes interspersed between music by Boston bands.

“NF01 :: Union Square (The Chirping Sidewalk)” takes place starting at 10 pm at Toast Lounge in Union Square, Somerville. The event is presented in partnership with Union Square Main Streets and Somerville Community Access Television (SCAT) on occassion of the MIT-GSD-LSE conference Writing Cities.

Some very exciting news! Yellow Arrow :: Capitol of Punk, the interactive documentary we made in 2006 about Washington D.C. and its punk music history, is going to be exhibited at MOMA in New York this spring. The project is a part of the larger exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind,”from February 24–May 12, 2008 on The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor. The exhibition was organized by Paola Antonelli, Curator, and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design. Here’s the description of the whole show:

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user’s interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Just returned from incredible Marfa, Texas and have now completed my final paper on ABCDF: Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City for Giuliana’s Bruno Proseminar on Film and Visual Studies theory. You can download the paper here.

Here’s a rough sample of the CD-Rom for ABC DF: The Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City. Unfortunatley, I couldn’t find a PC screen-capture software that allowed me to get the accompanying sounds, so that will have to be left to the imagination for now. Hopefully it at least gives a small impression of the nature of the project.

You’ll notice how the navigation system is set up with alphabetized dictionary terms at top, each calling up an image, video or sound. You’ll also notice that I occasionally click on the “Glossary” button that calls up the dictionary reference for the entry. Within the images, there are also linked references to other words (e.g. in “Abasto” I navigate to “Central de Abastos”). It is this cross-referential, associative structure in which I am particularly interested.

If you’re interested a little more background on the project, you can read my interview with Cristina Faesler Bremer, the lead editor and creator, here.

One of the papers I’m working right now for Peter Gordon’s “Weimar Intellectuals” seminar is about Walter Ruttmann’s amazing 1930 sound collage WEEKEND. Take a listen below. Special thanks to Jonathan Mitchell for introducing me to this piece. And I’ve also included the first draft of my text.

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Research Précis

Walter Ruttmann’s WEEKEND:
Sound, Space and the Multiple Senses of an Urban Documentary Imaginary

Subject Background

On June 6th, 1930 a radically new form of radio was broadcast over the Berlin airwaves. An 11′ 20″ long collage of raw sounds greeted listeners accustomed to hearing news reports, occasional classical musical programs and, only very recently, literary works written specifically for radio performance, the nascent genre known as Hörspiel (”radio drama”). This startling work was WEEKEND, an audio documentary created by Walter Ruttmann, an avant-garde artist best known for his experimental filmmaking, most famously, his 1927 production BERLIN — Sinfonie einer Großstadt.

WEEKEND marks a milestone in the history of media arts as a first significant experiment in montage-based radio. The piece consists of six “movements,” transpiring from Saturday afternoon at the factory through a night out, a “pastoral” Sunday, and finally the city returning to work on Monday. Ruttmann gathered his sounds by driving around Berlin in a van with a hidden microphone, stopping at locations such as train stations, factories, and busy streets to record the uninhibited, rhythm of the city. For Ruttmann’s Hörspiel, the city of Berlin itself was the main actor, avoiding any traditional theatrical performers like other literary Hörspiele of the time. Ruttmann’s limited time recording in the studio was used to capture a few notes of classical instruments such as the violin and piano, but also to record the “playing” of non-traditional instruments such as a saw and hammer. Ruttmann recorded all of the material onto Tri-Ergon sound film, the Berlin company that pioneered the synthesis of sound and image technology in Europe. To understand the significance of editing and montage in Ruttmann’s work, one need only look at the amount of film processed from the beginning to the final product. After recording, Ruttmann had amassed 2000 meters of film. And the final piece was only 250 meters long, stitched together from 240 individual segments.

The first minute of WEEKEND, part of the “Jazz of Work” section, gives a strong impression of the overall work. Ruttmann opens with a growing sequence of gongs, spliced together at metric intervals, eventually growing in a crescendo into a quick instance of intensity with the sound of a factory machine, followed immediately by the repeated cuttings of a saw and a hammer, both also operating at the same rhythm and meter. Then, a church bell sounds, and the machine returns, for a more extended sequence, pulsating at a higher level. The act of detailed editing is now very clear: quick cuts to a few beats of the hammer and then back to the machine, a few cuts of the saw and then back to the whir of the machine. Another, different bell sounds. We hear a car start. A sequence of high-pitched notes on the violin. A single key of the piano. Then, a man’s voice, muffled like on a telephone. “Hallo Fraülein.” Quick cut to the clicking coins of an opening cash register. “Bitte Döhnhof zwoundvierzig vier null.” Cut back to the cash register. The conversation, is then broken, we hear a child’s voice and then the thumping engine of a car driving. The spoken fragments are treated first as independent sonic elements, and secondarily as narrative tools. Altogether, the first minute of WEEKEND is a whirlwind of acoustic experiences, together giving a highly visceral sense of the modern industrial city, the texture of its inhabitants voices, and its web of transportation and communication networks.

It is not surprising that Ruttmann, a pioneer of montage in film, instigated this innovation in the sphere of sound. To understand WEEKEND, one must also understand Ruttmann’s earlier urban documentary, BERLIN. In BERLIN, Ruttmann had already illustrated the potential for applying montage techniques towards the representation of urban life. For over a year, Ruttmann traveled around the city in a van with a concealed camera, much as he would do with the microphone for WEEKEND. He then took this mountain of material, and through extensive editing, produced the final work that portrays the diverse life of the city from dawn until night. The film progresses from its opening shots of trains arriving into the metropolis before the city has fully awaken to final images of fireworks culminating a celebratory evening. Throughout, Ruttmann deploys sophisticated montage techniques, creating juxtapositions and transitions along conceptual and formal lines. Albeit a symphony, BERLIN was a silent film. But Ruttmann’s the subtitle sinfonie hints at his larger interest in sound and musicality.

Research Context

Scholarship on Ruttmann’s work is slim, especially in English, but even in his native German. It is likely Ruttmann has not received the same attention as his avant-garde colleagues, because of his later affiliations with the NAZIs. Ruttmann remained in Germany after Hitler’s rise to power and joined the NS propaganda machine, directing industry films and working as an assistant on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. In the work that has been done on Ruttmann, not surprisingly, the main focus of scholarship has been on this issue of politics and centered on Ruttmann’s filmic output, especially BERLIN. Kracauer’s damning critique of BERLIN at the time, also surely contributed to marginalizing Ruttmann.

Following its broadcast, there was critical response to WEEKEND from various Weimar intellectuals. Writing in the Film-Kurier journal at the time, critic Lotte H. Eisner described Ruttmann’s project as “photographing space through sound.” Hans Richter, fellow filmmaker and DADA artist, called it “a symphony of sound…woven into a poem.” Also, reknowned film editor Paul Falkenberg wrote a short essay for Film Culture applauding Ruttmann’s sound editing innovations.

There has been very little academic scholarship written about WEEKEND. There a few paragraphs and quick oblique references in some books of German literary criticism on the Neües Horspiel of the 1960s, where the authors name WEEKEND to establish the historical context of the genre. The most extensive treatment of WEEKEND is a section in Antje Vowinckel’s Collagen im Hörspiel, in which she critically historicizes the work over seven pages. Vowinckel also includes a very helpful diagram that maps the progression of sounds through the piece. Vowinckel’s argument revolves around Ruttmann’s treatment of space and time. She details how Ruttmann’s subtle use of volume and distance from the microphone spatializes such sounds as doors opening and closing, trains leaving the station, and the progression of cars in traffic, successfully placing the listener into the aural-spatial context of the city itself. In terms of time, her main argument highlights how Ruttmann plays with chronology. The piece’s name and overall structure is, of course, a progression of time over three days. However, Vowinckel argues, this is a fragmented whole, a composite collage of many montaged fragments.

“Blindness” and a Urban Documentary Imaginary

My aim is to further develop the discussion of WEEKEND in the context of urban representation. While groundbreaking on many fronts, I am most interested in Ruttmann’s attempt to represent the urban experience in a purely sonic form. For as Fran Tonkiss writes, “The modern city, for all that there is to see, is not only spectacular: it is sonic.” It is precisely this interplay between the visual and the aural in the context of urban space and its representation through montage that makes Ruttmann’s work so compelling.

In interviews and his own writings, Ruttmann repeatedly called WEEKEND a “blind film,” a highly adept and evocative title. In his groundbreaking 1936 study of radio, Rudolf Arnheim located the medium’s unique artistic possibilities in its “blindness.” He argued against mainstream theory at the time that advocated for radio to create images in the minds of its listeners. He saw this perspective as based in seeing radio as somehow “sensorially defective” in comparison with film. Instead, Arnheim believed radio was most powerful when it leveraged its uniquely non-visual character, its “blindness,” creating its own aural world rather than striving foremost to convey visual pictures. What distinguishes WEEKEND is precisely its power to immerse listeners in the auditory landscape of the city, foregrounding the aural qualities of phenomena often represented visually.

WEEKEND, however, should not be seen in exclusively aural terms. Like the lived experience of the city, Ruttmann creates a rich, multisensorial environment. W.J.T. Mitchell writes, “there are no visual media.” There is no such thing as “reified sensory labels such as ‘visual,’ ‘aural,’ and ‘tactile’,” but instead only “sensory ratios.” He argues that often multiple media are “nested” within each other, for example when a television program is treated as the subject of a film. WEEKEND demonstrates the effectiveness of such an approach to media analysis. In WEEKEND, the sound of the saw does not evoke an image of a saw. Instead, the sound functions independently, rhythmically, musically. The sound of a train, though, is more recognizable and is not spliced and repeated like an independent note. The rhythm of the train is the actual rhythm of the train, as it operates in the city. However, Ruttmann subverts a purely literal representation, by embedding the sound in the overall montage as another musical component. It is, in Mitchell’s term, thereby “nested.” The blindness of the medium remains foregrounded, while the visual is not entirely suppressed. It is this varied approach to documentary material, used both to evoke real urban phenomena and abstracted as musical sound, that draws the listener’s imagination into the multisensorial nature of urban space.

References

Arnheim, Rudolf. Rundfunk als Hörkunst. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979.

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary. A History of Non-Fiction Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion. Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002.

Cory, Mark. “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art.” In Wireless Imagination. Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

Dimendberg, Edward. Film noir and the spaces of modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Döhl, Reinhard. Das neue Hörspiel. Geschichte und Typologie des Hörspiels. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesselschaft, 1988.

Eisner, Lotte H. “Reichsrundfunk sendet akustische Filme.” In Film-Kurier, 6/15/1930. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Walter Ruttmann schneidet ein Filmhörspiel.” In Film-Kurier Nr. 33, 3/1/1930. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Ruttmanns photographisches Hörspiel.” In Film-Kurier Nr. 33, 3/1/1930. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

Falkenberg, Paul. “Tonmontage. A propos Walter Ruttmann.” In Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

Goergen, Jeanpaul. “Walter Ruttmann — ein Porträt.” In Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

“Jerzy Toeplitz im Gespräch mit Walter Ruttmann.” In Wiadomosci Literackie, 10. Jg., 1933, Nr. 28. Translated to German by Erik Steiner. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

Kahn, Douglas. “Histories of Sound Once Removed.” In Wireless Imagination. Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

————. Noise, Water, Meat. A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Wintrhop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

LaBelle, Brandon. Backgrond noise: perspectives on sound art. New York: Contuum Publishing, 2006.

MacDonald, Scott. The Garden in the Machine. A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “There Are No Visual Media.” In Journal of Visual Culture 4.2 (2005): 258-266.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Renov, Michael, ed. Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Richter, Hans. “Experiments with Celluloid.” The Penguin Film Review 9 (1949), p. 114.

Ruttmann, Walter. “Die ‘absolute’ Mode.” In Film-Kurier, Berlin, Nr. 30, Feb. 3, 1928. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Wie ich meinen BERLIN-Film drehte.” In Licht-Bild-Bühne, Berlin, Nr. 241, Oct. 8, 1927. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Berlin als Filmstar.” In Berliner Zeitung, Sept. 20, 1927. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Kunst und Kino.” 1917 letter in possession of Deutschen Filmmuseums Frankfurt/Main. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

Tonkiss, Fran. “Aural Postcards: Sound, Memory and the City.” In The auditory culture reader. Edited by Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

Vowinckel, Antje. Collagen im Hörspiel. Die Entwicklung einer radiophonen Kunst. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1995.

Uricchio, William. “Ruttmann nach 1933.” In Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

Weiss, Allen S, ed. Experimental sound and radio. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.