City 415
Berkeley MA Thesis Project
Soundtrack by DJ S4 (Sean Spicer)
To personify a city is not a foreign, or hardly a new, innovative concept or notion. From the start of civilization, our artists, our poets, our writers -- we have dreamed the idea of a city into a living entity, one that possesses our virtues as well as our vices, as our playground and as our battlefields, as a soul that has memory, and a story to tell. From Dickens' war torn two metropolises to Zola's Paris emerging from one bloody conflict ever on the brink of another, the urban environments and what, or who, it becomes remains a constant fascination to those that live and pass through them. Even Joyce, in his scatters and streams, presents a world of stone and material that stills breathes.
Hunched over in hoods, they hurry down the streets, dodging the rain that blows in slantwise motion. The sun shines over the visitors, the tourists that enter to bring home souvenirs of pre-constructed memories and images of what is the city. The petty battles that rage down the streets, the protests that have no cause but the cause of protest, the flock of feathers from pillow fights at the waterfront as the commuters go home across the bay - all interwoven by paths, bounded by edges, frozen at landmarks. The short Asian ladies with their pink bags pushing to claim space on the #45, the girls in black wardrobe with their striped socks trodding in oversized maryjanes, the Ferlinghettis that stalk the cafes once with paper now with their sleek laptops, the homeless woman doomed to forever repeat singing "Spare Change...?"sitting against the brick buildings of Market Street -- we bring with us suitcases of memories of past places, forging our own associations and mapways to create the idea of "place". In all this, the mis-en-scene is set, created, and yet remains malleable. And when the last commuter drives across the Bay Bridge to their homes, and the last party boy hangs his feathered fedora up to rest, the city sleeps. And of what does it dream?
This project first emerged into being as a whimsical exploration into the depiction of the dreams and nightmares of cities sleeping, a series of 2D images called metropolisREM, that were created from layers of photographic collage, vector drawings, and digital painting. The spirit of the endeavor was to attempt to capture the essence of individual cities through light and darkness, mood, color, and arrangement, to be recognizable and relatable, in the way we feel familiarity and kinship to phone number area codes from the places we have lived. It is now a more, while not initially thought possible, interdisciplinary pursuit than before, yet more limited in the confines of concentrating on one city alone as well as the limitations of medium. For purposes of both proximity and familiarity, the central dense area of San Francisco has been chosen. metropolisREM has evolved from 2D projection / print into the medium of video for its temporal advantage and restriction, and will draw from three starting points and considerations -- large-scale design theory, technical and applied computer science in the area of lighting and rendering, and the aesthetic, both rule driven and instinctive.
The memories and associations are as fleeting as they remain written upon the face of our environment. What can be referred to a social unconsciousness is here in this project a reference to the subconsciousness of the city itself, as it lives and sleeps. The content attempts to reflect this, the shifting nature of visual memory we have of cities, in the magic of a "place", and the fragility frozen in time. In this whimsical search, perhaps in these fragments sewn together, another fragment is created and found, one that not only mirrors, but exists, as a fragment of truth.