A Game Produced By Isabelle Clemence Angieri

ruins
A Game
Produced By
Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Part I : the lamest weirdo
introduction
graphic and extragraphic
guide
the lamest weirdo
a fire works
ruin body
competitor alignment
body to body
closing
game plan
Part II : drawing ruins
introduction
composition
guide
death
closing
decomposition
ink
is
dry
and
t
h
e
architecture
is alreadyapart
Everything decomposes and is involved in the thorough and
unforgiving process of ruin - the pull of entropy and the
stubborn act of fighting it. That architecture acts in this way
is a certainty. Drawings are a sort of ruin. The images we
create are an ever shifting landscape of the broken, abused,
refuted, comical, irrelevant, irreverent, and ignored. The ruin
is ubiquitous. Rather than lament this fact, it becomes an
argument for specificity. The thesis deals with the illustrated
ruin, rather than the ruin itself. This thesis is a game, whose
working title is The Lamest Weirdo.
If The Lamest Weirdo were a gameshow, contestants would
compete to create the most real graphic representation. This
form of creation, one in which entropy plays a stubborn role,
would be the highest form of accomplishment and would
receive much praise. When the judges would be unnable to
declare a victor, the competitor with the most real extragraphic
explanations would win.
The protagonist in The Lamest Weirdo, is the lamest wierdo,
a competitor whose drawings are ever the most enigmatic
graphic obfuscations accompanied by ever the most cryptic
extragraphic explanations. Tlw’s competitors include, tlw’s foil,
and two others whose works stands in for accepted graphic
standards. Without willing participants, I, the arbiter of The
Lamest Weirdo, have the option to recruit unwilling participants,
or to benefit from the multiplicity of mind-bodies that I can
provide. By mind-bodies, I mean characters. The Lamest Weirdo
cannot exist without characters. Or character, for that matter.
The Lamest Weirdo also requires a thematic prompt and a ruin
body from which to extract the most real graphics. The original
thesis A Fire Works serves as the ruin body for this, the first
installment of The Lamest Weirdo.
In the following section, I will explain, as clearly as possible,
the original thesis A Fire Works. If entropy is to have its way, we
shall at least let it start from a position of utter blankness.
lw
a guide
lamest weirdo
Our protagonist is commited to making strange
things. It is its own fringe community, party of one.
Often creating obtuse or meaningless graphic and
extragraphic work, the lamest weirdo does sometimes
come by a breakthrough, usually closely followed by
intense stagnation.
action
The action begins with the challenge to represent the
thesis A Fire Works. Tlw competes with three other
contestants to prove that it’s representation is the real
simulacra of the thesis, the real real.
external conflict
In competition with three other contestants, tlw must
also contend with A Fire Works itself. You see, tlw is not
content to simply be the real simulacra, but strives to be
the real real, which everyone assumes A Fire Works to
be. Also, one of the contestants, the foil, is practically
identical to tlw, which further undermines tlw’s identity.
goal
Tlw must fully transcend the foil. Tlw struggles to
prove its reality while still competing with the other
characters, and struggles with internal problem, “am I
real, or trying to prove I am real? Is it possible that I am
not, and if so, when I prove that I am, what does that
mean?”
lw
a guide
obstacles
The representation styles of the other competitors are
all different accepted standards.
Each competitors claims to be the real thing.
Tlw’s goal to be the real real distracts it from the
competition at hand.
problem
The other characters and the competition initially
distract tlw and are a constant reminder of tlw’s struggle
to define and represent creatively and with a singular
vision. Ironically, tlw must resolve this problem by
manipulating and distorting the very source of the
struggle: the graphics of the other competitors.
growth
The influences of the other drawings will temper tlw’s
work, allowing it to transform and distort A Fire Works
work simultaneously.
end
Tlw is disqualified.
conclusion
Tlw ejects itself from the competition. In order to truly
win, to become the real real, tlw realizes it must break
fundamental graphic standards. Still, tlw in the end is
unable to transcend its context: it is granted the victory
over the other competitors.
body
This is A Fire Works.
GEOMETRY
FORGE
FUEL
FIRE
ASSAULT
DARKNESS
DESTRUCTION
ASH
PYRE
BURN
RITUAL
CULTURE
MYTHOLOGY
WARMTH
HEARTH
FOOD
NEW LIFE
LIGHT
PROTECTION
body
This diagram explains the logic of A Fire Works.
ABSTRACT
Fires of the suns; ancients; wars; wilderness; plains; old homes in the mountains, and new ones on the
hill; battles; zealots; revolutions; earthquakes; burnings; volcanoes; forges; hearths; storms; ordeals; pyres;
artifices; natures; destructions; news; walkings; makings; worships; eternal flames; altars; dances; rituals;
sacrifices; magics; temples; assaults; sermons; myths; kings; waters; bonfires; feasts; cults; darknesses;
festivals; blessings; halloweens; wheels; and other flames will burn it all and everything to ashes on the
ground.
At the intersection of mythology and geometry, this text looks to address the
nature of fire as a force which flows along and penetrates media in a cycle of
destruction, transformation, and regeneration. The sacred, as Mircea Eliade
writes, is a continuing element spattered throughout contemporary life, bleeding
from points to flows which frame human experience. Roland Barthes’ Mythologies
gather lines of cultural criticism around a point: the sacred in the profane. My
interest in mythology is in the vein of Eliade and Barthes: it is to comment upon
and question the quotidian through the interrogation of fires, passions. The
interrogation will find a geometry of its own, a packing together and explosion
of elements which define an order. Such are the relationship between mythology,
geometry, and fire.
Through the implementation of and synthesis of existing methods of defining,
controlling, and representing fire through the medium of wood, the thesis
merges the myth of fire and its cultural practice with contemporary methods of
fabrication.
This aesthetic, cultural, and geometric investigation seeks to transform the
landscape through fire and fabrication. A Fire-Works, if you will. The thesis
grapples with the idea of fire as a force to be controlled and responded to in a
symbiotic way through built interventions.
body
This abstract explains the thesis of A Fire Works.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mythology
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1972. Print.
Eliade, Mircea. The sacred and the profane. Vol. 11. London: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1959.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1st edition. New York: Picador, 2001. Print.
Kostof, Spiro. “A history of architecture: settings and rituals.” New York (1995).
Mostafavi, Mohsen. On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time. MIT Press,
1993. Print.
Representation
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard
Howard. Hill
and Wang, 1982. Print.
---. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
Print.
---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Reissue edition. New York:
Hill and
Wang, 1975. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
United States:
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010. Print.
Grunenberg, Christoph, and Sheila Kennedy. KVA: Material Misuse. Architectural
Association, 2001. Print.
Robinson, Howard M. “Prime Matter in Aristotle.” Phronesis (1974): 168-188.
Fire
Blackman, Winifred S. “The Magical and Ceremonial Uses of Fire.” Folklore 27.4
(1916):
352–377. Print.
Boodle, L. A. “The Nature of Charred Wood.” Bulletin of Miscellaneous
Information
(Royal Gardens, Kew) 1917.9/10 (1917): 306–308. JSTOR. Web. 2 Oct. 2014.
Bowman, David MJS, et al. “Fire in the Earth system.” science 324.5926 (2009):
481-484.
Cairns, Stephen, and Jane M. Jacobs. Buildings Must Die: A
Perverse View of Architecture.
MIT Press, 2014. Print.
Caple, Chris, and Will Murray. “Characterization of a
Waterlogged Charred Wood and
Development of a Conservation Treatment.” Studies in
Conservation 39.1 (1994):
28–38. JSTOR. Web. 2 Oct. 2014.
HOAGLAND, EDWARD. “Fire.” The American Scholar 69.4
(2000): 57–60. Print.
“Information about the Fire Triangle/Tetrahedron and
Combustion.” N.p., n.d. Web. 1
Oct. 2014.
Irigaray, Luce. “The forgetting of air in Martin Heidegger.”
(1999).
Kelley, Francis Clement. Charred Wood. Chicago: Extension
Press, 1917.
oskicat.berkeley.edu Library Catalog. Web. 2 Oct. 2014.
History
Pyne, Stephen J. Fire: A Brief History. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2001.
Print.
Strohmaier, David. “Threescore and Ten: Fire, Place, and Loss
in the West.” Ethics and
the Environment 8.2 (2003): 31–41. Print.
body
The next five images explain the precedent for A Fire Works.
Merry Company by Pieter Aertsen
Alchemical Symbol for Fire
Vu l c a n b y Pe t e r Pa u l R u b e n s
Tr a d i t i o n a l J a p a n e s e Y u g a s a k i b y Te r u n o b u F u j i m o r i
Charred Whiskey Barrel by Glen Moray
body
The next ten images explain the architecture of A Fire Works.
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Probe by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
to
body
Each competitor comes with a unique personality and set of concerns
regarding the representation of space. Their profiles in the following pages not
only describe the perspectives they bring to the lamest wierdo, but the quality of
the dimensions by which they operate and understand space.
body 1: the lamest wierdo
Our protagonist is commited to making strange things
that it either doesn’t care to or can’t explain.
body 2 : i love technology
i love technology is as predictably disruptive as they are
innovative.
body 3 : back 2 basics
back 2 basics is a traditionalist in the traditional sense
of the word.
body 4 : tilting at windmills
Their are two kinds of people: those that believe they
make up reality, and those that believe they accept it.
lamest
wierdo
The protagonist in The Lamest Weirdo, is the lamest wierdo,
a competitor whose drawings are ever the most enigmatic
graphic obfuscations accompanied by ever the most cryptic
extragraphic explanations.
They believe content is a value in and of itself which operates
outside of context: it is a universal known that is ever in the
repetitive process of becoming uknown. The process itself
is valuable, yet tlw neither documents their processes, nor
attempts to recreate them. Essentially, tlw believes themself to
operate chaotically. They expect outsiders to contextualize and
derive order from their work, and for that effort to continually
fail.
tlw’s greatest struggle is to be incomprehensible, and therefore
they shield themself from understanding their own work, not
wishing to give themself away.
love
technology
i love technology is as predictably disruptive as they are innovative.
Disruptive as they are, they rely on out of the box solutions, for problems
in the box, and in the box solutions for out of the box problems. The most
exciting problem for i love technology is how to disrupt the box itself. “How
many boxes are there? What if a box isn’t a box at all, but a sphere? If a box
is open, can I disrupt by closing it?” The only thing i love technology loves
more than disrupting problems, is disrupting solutions to problems. i love
technology is most interested in process and context, and believes content
takes care of itself.
This line of innovative questioning figures into i love technology’s approach to
disrupting, i mean representing, the ruin body “a fire works”.
to
basics
back 2 basics is a traditionalist in the traditional sense of the word. They start
every project by constructing a site model, followed by ten rough formal
massings which fit into the site.
Prior to entering the competition, back 2 basics believed the competition to
be a traditional architectural competition. Although they would never have
entered the competition had they known it was unconventional, back 2
basics stoically continues to work toward a winning project, hoping that the
recent trend toward nostalgic and antique aesthetics will prove advantageous
to their entry.
More than anything, back 2 basics is commited to the things they start,
believing that ‘any publicity is good publicity’, hoping to ‘really break out’ into
winning career by beating out their competitors.
at
windmills
Their are two kinds of people: those that believe they make up reality, and
those that believe they accept it.
tilting at windmills are excruciatingly of the former persuasion. they speak in
aphorisms. Those who accept their words do so unequivocally. Speaking of
pure art, unmitigated by others and with uncompromising rigidity, they rule
with sacharine pride and collective individuality over the crowd-sourced, the
democratic, the remixed, and the stagnating group. The relationship between
the degradation and the virality of tilting at windmills work is inverse: as their
work degrades, its virality increases, and vice versa.
they resolve to prove the superiority of their work, no matter its actual value
to anyone, suffering the content creators, declaring their dominion via
bombardments of virality.
plan
The Lamest Weirdo depends not only on stability and systematic
thinking to work, but flexibility and openness. The resulting
third order is difficult to describe without falling back on cliche
extragraphic explanations. It is an uknown, and the work of
this thesis is to strive, with fervor and gumption, to create
while constantly on the brink of uncertainty.
So it goes, on The Lamest Weirdo.
Artifact by Francesco Borromini
The ink is not dry and the architecture is already falling apart.
I have doubted everything. I have stared into the abyss of
formalism, one toe over the edge.What is architecture? Where
is the Academy taking us with its wheels spinning so furiously?
This thesis is founded in doubts about architecture. In the face
of doubt, I have always looked for certainty.
The closest thing to certainty is entropy: reality and metaphor.
Why is entropy so certain? And what does it have to do with
reality and metaphor? The answer to the former question
can be found in the most uncertain of likely places, and the
most unlikely of certain places: wikipedia. The answer to the
latter question is a bit more convoluted. If in reality, entropy
is certain, then realistically, just about everything - including
architecture - is in a constant state of ruin, and that reality may
be interpreted in metaphorical terms. To be plain:
The heat death of the Universe is a historically suggested
ultimate fate of the universe in which the Universe has
diminished to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and
therefore can no longer sustain processes that consume energy,
including computation and life.
Everything decomposes and is involved in the thorough and
unforgiving process of ruin - the pull of entropy and the
stubborn act of fighting it. That Architecture exists in this way
is a certainty. Architecture ruins. It reduces to a state of decay,
collapse, and disintegration. Drawings are a sort of ruin. The
images we create are an ever shifting landscape of the broken,
Artifact by MIchael Hill
abused, refuted, comical, irrelevant, irreverent, and ignored.
The ruin is ubiquitous. Even the myth, the legend, the hero, is
susceptible to ruin, and particularly so. The myth is the most
despised and ridiculed of ruins, falling from so high above us
to ruin and shame. Fact is finite. In fiction there is no end to
the love you can get, and by the same virtue, no end to the
hate. Rather than lament this fact, it becomes an argument
for specificity. This thesis considers the ruin of the myth most
integral to the architectural academy: the drawing.
What is it to draw? What is the goal of architectural drawing?
Storytelling? Art? Instruction? If we hold that storytelling in
architecture may be a means of communicating information
of or relating to space, then storytelling is architecture. If we
hold that art in architecture may be a means of communicating
information of or relating to space, then art is architecture.
The common denominator between storytelling and art, the
communication of information of or relating to space, remains
constant. If the communication of information of or relating
to space is architecture, then is drawing really the architect’s
most essential tool? Or is it simply a means, such as storytelling
or art, which imparts a certain flavor and set of constraints, to
an end?
This thesis contends that while drawing, like art and
storytelling, is an artifact of architecture, the communication of
information of or relating to space, its limitations as a medium
are increasingly debilitating to the academy and the profession.
I present the representational artifacts, the ruins, of information
I am trying to convey to you of or relating to space. These are
ruins of a generative computational geometry. These are honest
representations, yet at once superficial disguises. These are
the body snatchers: their control over Architecture instigates
its demise. This thesis is a dramatic reenactment - the body
snatchers’ work has long ago been set in motion, and the ruin
of the drawing is imminent, if not already extant.
Artifact by Francesco Borromini
Is drawing dead? Is geometry the only means to articulate
spatial boundaries?
The year is 1634. Francesco Borromini, the young neurotic
geometry enthusiast and lover of Antiquity receives his first
major independent commission to design the church, cloister
and monastic buildings of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane.
His mind and hands are immediately engrossed in transcribing
his longing through the descriptive geometry of interlocking
geometric configurations, tenderly manipulating the Classical
architectural forms he feels so deeply, refining a symbolic
rational that speaks through the one he loves best, his beautiful,
articulate, ardor, his drawings. Of this I am sure, out of all of
us, he had passion for them most. Dead before the birth of the
offspring of their joy, the building also known as San Carlino,
and despite the ruin of their corporeal, and now digital,
bodies, Borromini and his drawings live on in our collective
imagination.
As we look to the past for answers, our gaze is brought back
to the present condition, to the death of drawing, and our
constant struggle to keep it alive, if not in its corporeal form,
then in spirit. In the descriptive geometry of Borromini, we find
the seed of drawings’ obsolescence, computation. When the act
of drawing is founded in computation, it is computation that
generates form. The mind is the architect, and computation
itself is the medium, the living being. The offspring of their
joy is the drawing. The old ways and lines become artifacts
tenderly manipulated by the mind. The hand is lost. the hand
grieves, yet the mind rejoices, generating living logic with an
ease the hand never knew with drawing.
Artifact by Isabelle Angieri
Artifact by MIchael Hill
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by MIchael Hill
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by MIchael Hill
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by MIchael Hill
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by MIchael Hill
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Here together now, we bear witness to these artifacts of
generative computational geometry. This work defies geometry
as the sole articulator of spatial boundaries. Drawing where
the exacerbation of geometry is the single truth. The optics
of geometry on geometry confound expected boundaries and
scales, producing ephemera, energy, events in time.
Working with the artifacts of optics through different ways
of zooming into spaces, highly dependent on geometry itself,
be it through 16th century large scale lenses, 20th century
cinematographic mechanical shifting lenses, or 21st century
nano and micro lenses. Please take a few minutes now to see
and experience these artifacts, using compounded geometries
over geometries as a means of questioning their veracity.
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri
Artifact by Isabelle Clemence Angieri