Mechanical Eye Week 10

“How to ground?”

Picking up the pieces from the various experiments of the pervious weeks, this week presents itself as a challenge to ground the site within the world of Unity and Oculus, the realm of virtual reality.

To keep borrowing the field created by Krauss and Marpillero, the meshes produced so far has bear more similarity to sculptures than to sites. When looking them through the Oculus, the strong sense of self containment resists the entry of the body within the space. It has unfortunately become a sculpture in space and I could not reach and experience from within. A need to ground the site arise from this virtual experience.

In response to Krauss’ essay, Sarah Oppenheimer lays out the variables one receives when looking at a site: Materiality, circulation, flow, boundaries, tectonics, visual and acoustic quality, and many more. These are all issues that need to be considered when working on the site in this project (1). Specifically to this project, the materiality and boundaries have been central to the past and present trials with the site.

As a first step to reconcile the seemly disparate pieces, I ground the merged scan of the two rooms from week 7 into a landscape of nCloth mesh that I remade this week. While the nCloth mesh made on week 8 have been successful in smoothening the edges and expressing its suppleness. It nonetheless still exists as objects. The landscape of mesh needs to be more open and inviting for the entry of the body. After a few initial trials, the solution was rather a simple one. Instead of letting the nCloth fully wrap around the rooms, the process is stopped earlier to let the nCloth only mold and fold around the top of the rooms. The resulting mesh has become something that is similar to a landscape that you find in nature, which serves as a ground for the distinctively man-made rooms. The process grounding is not a gentle one, but rather involves the collision of the two meshes that the “natural” landscape begins the eat into the ruins of the “artificial” rooms. The edge of the site is now nearly defined as the folded square of the landscape but the boundary between the two rooms is now fully gone, being submerged into the landscape. One can no longer tell which room they are in when walking through the grounds of the site.

Grounding of the merged room in the regenerated landscape.

Grounded site rendered in Maya. The untextured landscape begins to eat into the rooms.

Dreams are deconstructivists, they distort and fragmentized space into ruins one would walk through. Recognition of small pieces would emerge here and there as something that is strangely familiar. The images rendered in Maya resonate with the dreamscape described, bearing this surreal quality of the ruins that is also not dissimilar to the Roman ruins buried in the ground. As part of the ruins jut out from the ground, it creates an ambiguity of space as the components of the rooms become deconstructed as fragments, connected only by the smooth ground. Following this lead, I experimented further in Unity in order to reinforce the creation of such surreal ruins. By texturing the landscape with grass, it become clearly recognizable as the ground, thus giving the sense of gravity to the site. On the other hand, the texture of the ruins is slightly iridescent and transparent, giving an ephemeral quality to the space. The contrast of the permanence of the ground and the ephemera of the ruins responds to the concepts of surreal ambiguity that exists in dreamscapes. The meshes have truly become a site to be experienced.

Untextured site imported into Unity.

Grounded site as textured in unity. The solidity of the landscape contrasts with the ephemeral rooms.

Going on a slight tangent, it is interesting to see the strange similarity between the the creation of the ephemeral dreamscape on the solid ground in this project and the construction of amusement parks on Coney Island. Rem Koolhaas introduces to us the Luna Park, Steeplechase Park, and perhaps the most aptly named, Dreamland. The architecture of amusement parks were not buildings, they were sets that aim to evoke a certain feeling. It did not matter that the myriad of towers in Luna Park were unoccupiable, what matters was that they looked like real towers in a city. The creation of sets as site in virtual reality mirrors what is achieved by an amusement park in reality (2).

Coming back to the enhancement of surreality, I dimmed the sky and tried to add fog near the ground. While I was able to bring nightfall to the site in Unity, the fog has resisted my will and never come. Despite the partial setback, the darkness of the evening sky adds to the concept of dream by accidentally allows the iridescent material of the ruin to shine through the dark landscape, evoking a scene of dreams that we often see in animated movies. Going forward, the addition of the fog will only add to the surreality and ambiguity of the site by starting to blur the edge of the space in all directions.

Grounded dreamscape as rendered in Unity.

The site of the dreamscape prepares for the exploration of the body through all the ups and downs of the space. Similar to a lucid dream, which one begin able to discern dreaming, the body can freely roam through the space in the spirit of exploration (3). Only by reintroducing the body in the next stage will we be able to re-experience the dualities the exist between the far away two rooms in the mind.

References:

1. Sarah Oppenheimer. “Responses” (2014), in Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), pp. 219–222
2. Rem Koolhaas. “Coney Island: The Technology of the Fantastic” (1978), Delirious New York (New York, NY: The Monacelli Press, 1997), pp. 29–79
3. Zoë Heller, “Why We Sleep, and Why We Often Can’t”, The New Yorker (December 3, 2018). Link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/why-we-sleep-and-why-we-often-cant