The project I am currently working on has been part funded by a small research grant given by the FADE [Fine Art in the Digital Environment] research group, which is a joint Camberwell college of Art and Chelsea College of Art initiative. This project is being carried out with Katrin Maria Escay, a former student of mine form the MA digital Arts course at Camberwell.

This paper is based on a project that is still under development. The project is a motion graphic exploration of the relationship between the Michael Faraday Memorial Sculpture and its location, a roundabout in Elephant and Castle. I use the term motion graphic because this work may have several outcomes, including an interactive one, so I feel it is important to distinguish the work from 'moving image' or 'digital movie' descriptors.

The Michael Faraday memorial sculpture was built in 1961, by Architect Rodney Gordon, to celebrate the life and work of the self taught scientist Michael Faraday who was born nearby, in 1791. The sculpture was originally intended to be made of glass so that the electrical substation it contains could be seen by the public. However this initial idea was scrapped and it was finally built with 728 stainless steel cladding panels. Counter to the urban myth, electronica muscian Aphex Twin does not live underneath it.

The Faraday Sculpture is due to be relocated, as part of the Elephant and Castle redevelopment. So the project is an opportunity to explore the relationship of the sculpture to its immediate environment, before it gets moved to a side street. Another aim of the project would be to create an artwork that would reinstate the importance of this sculpture. A chance to reclaim it from the traffic and restore its presence in the Elephant and Castle.

Developing a strategy to visualise the restoration of this sculpture, is still very much an ongoing process. However previous work, and quote from Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas, suggested a way forward.

Rem Koolhaas had identified and key contradiction, that questioned the immediate assumption that Architecture and the City are united in defining an urban space. In an Interview with Hans Obrist, he argued that in fact they are opposites:
'I think it's very surprising that architecture and urbanism are always mentioned in one breath because I think that they are not only radically different things but actually are opposites. I think that architecture is a desperate attempt to exercise control and urbanism is the failure of that attempt.' [Obrist, H.U. 2006 p. 52]

So he is saying that urbanism is the result of Architecture's attempt to impose an order or structure. The result, or failure could be interpreted as a situation of chaos. The urban landscape consists of a series of architectural impositions that generate a turbulence. This, cynically, would be a definition that many would apply to the Elephant and Castle. It has been defined by the needs of traffic rather then a coherent attempt to create a space for the inhabitants.

The particular location of the faraday Sculpture, means it is often visually obscured, from the surrounding public spaces, by traffic. This traffic also physically cuts us off from the structure and it also creates an audio barrier to the sculpture as well. So all our senses are affected and enhance its isolation from the city. Yet whilst many people that are familiar with the Elephant and Castle do not know the sculptures function, they are familiar with its presence. This suggests that the sculpture does 'radiate' its presence, that it does compete within the chaos of this particular area of London.

Now that this notion of 'radiance' or presence is established how could this be represented or captured within a motion graphic medium?

Grids.

My wider research aims are looking at how methodologies of architectural representation can inform the production and display of motion graphic sequences, and in return what can we learn about urban spaces from motion graphics.

I used my experience of working within an architectural context to identify three key pieces of information that explain the process of spatial organisation and construction. Namely Plan, Section and Elevation. Each has a unique purpose, but they all have common ground in that they are two dimensional representations of a structure. They are not complicated by perspective. They describe a structure or place in a form of non hierarchical language, without opinion. Vitruvius, a Roman Architect working approx. 30 BC, also identified these three methods of representation and a clear link can be made to his three core components of construction namely:

Utilitas = function – Plan
Firmitas = structure – Section
Venustas = beauty – Elevation

It is these three representational types [plan, section + elevation] that I am aiming to interpret into motion graphic language.

All of these methods of drawing employ a grid. The architectural grid acts a functional tool to locate specific areas of interest to the builder and architect and they can act as a visual reminder of the scale of a structure. Grids also locate key components of the structure such as columns etc. The grid aids the craftsmen to visualise the structure. More importantly when an architect starts a drawing the grid is the first component to be drawn, it defines the extent of the building.

For some architects the grid has become a essential part of the language of their Architecture. Eisenman and Liebeskind are two high profile architects who have utilised the concept of the grid, and explored the possibilities of their architecture within this structure. Liebeskind's Jewish museum in Berlin, for example. This buildings complex shape, is derived by generating a grid formed by joining the locations where Jewish residents were known to have been arrested during the Nazi era, but then disappeared. No trace of them ever resurfaced.
During my research it was the work of Peter Eisenman that seemed to suggest that grids have a role to play in my motion graphic work. Eisenman's use of the grid in his IBA project [in the then West Berlin], and in the Wexner Center project outlines the role of the grid to that beyond a construction tool. In the IBA project he explains the use the grid in the following way:

'In positioning the site walls, the diagrams consisted of three superposed grids: a modern grid of squares; the eighteenth-century Berlin street grid; and an abstract Mercator Grid [a grid-based method of specifying locations on the surface of the Earth]'

So here he works with three grids on one site. The term 'superposed' is the key word in this text. By this term Eisenman's intention is to free the grids from their function, they are just patterns that sit inside the site.
The Wexner Center was defined by a curious 'cock-up' by surveyors in America:

'The diagrams constructed a relationship between the grid of the site and the grid of Ohio. This grid was established in the early nineteenth century when Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis Clark out to survey what would become the the Northwest Territory. Lewis and Clark and the Virginia Land Company surveyed form the south to the north while surveyors form the Western Reserve of Connecticut surveyed form the north to the south. The surveys met at a line in Ohio, but because the surveyors' transits were set with different readings of true north their grids did not align. The imaginary line where the two grids abut, called the Miami Trace, can be experienced on many north-south roads that line Ohio's counties. There is a point where the roads turn ninety degrees in an east-west direction for some distance then turn another ninety degrees back to north-south. In the design of the Wexner Center, this grid shift was scaled to our site and the building became a microcosm of the trace in the shifted grid.'

Using grids as a tool within this project was further enhanced by a chance discussion with an architect who explained the much of London is defined by a grid, but a grid defined by nature. The scale of the housing stock of London, particularly Georgian and Victorian, is defined by trees. The joists of the building, these span the width, came form trees and these obviously only reach a certain height. So this determined the width of the building and hence generated a grid pattern that has become the 'DNA' of much of constructed London.
The flexibility of the use of the grid, its inherent quality of being able to be integral to the construction of a building and at the same time to float free from the material building, suggested it could be used within the Elephant and Castle project.

An earlier project 'Rain 1' was my first opportunity to attempt to extract a grid from a moving image sequence. Filmed during a very heavy and violent thunderstorm that is a typical afternoon occurrence in Kuala Lumpur, the grid has been defined by roof tiles, a grille on a fan, by steps, and a storm drain. The grid has been formed in a topological manner, in that it ignores Euclidean space. I have defined the grid on the surface of the film. By reversing the sequence of the grids, the spatial quality of the footage changes . It removes a sense of perspective, which, as discussed earlier, ties in well with the nature of architectural drawing.
For a print show currently touring the UK, the process was applied to still images. This allowed exploration of using vertical and horizontal grids, to completely rewrite the space with the existing elements.

How will this project develop?

Other then recording the sculpture and exploring possible treatments for the footage, it is the development of a visual and aural narrative that will sustain an eight to ten minute motion graphic sequence, that needs to be addressed. By Narrative I do not mean a fiction or story, but a sequence [both aural and visual] that sits somewhere between a documentary, and a short image clip, of the type that may be used in VJ context. The sequence would need to address the issue of the loop, should there be a beginning and end, or should the piece be without these? This is important if the work is to be shown on a continuous loop.

Pasar Malam is a motion graphic sequence that again uses a grid structure to 'challenge' our perception of spatial arrangement. This sequence uses an Islamic call to prayer [which was actually occurring during the filming], to generate a tempo for the piece. This is again using a grid but its using the audio to generate pattern, to which the motion graphic responds. Because this has an aural narrative, there was an inherited beginning and end, and when the piece was shown in an exhibition it was looped.

An area of immediate exploration, is that of using multiple grids, reflecting different scales of information. This project needs to explore the micro in relation to the macro. The micro reminds us that this is also a personalised space, it is not kept in a bubble. The sculpture may not visually dominate, but it has presence, and whether liked, hated or indifferent our relationship to it is constant.

The reality seems to suggest there will be several outcomes from this project. As mentioned earlier developing a potential interactive aspect to the footage will change our engagement with the piece completely. It will offer a chance to explore the relationship between audience and artwork, that may offer me the opportunity to develop a further understanding of this fractured relationship between the city the architecture and its inhabitants, or rather the city the grid and chaos.

The Memorial sculpture Conclusion.

As you have seen the sculpture itself lends itself to the use of a grid. The cladding lines form a pre made grid. It is important the grid should have a relationship to the subject, and not be just an arbitrarily imposed division of the frame. The images and sequences completed to date are just sketches exploring possible treatments, but they already are beginning to encapsulate some of the key components that I have identified, such as the removal of perspective etc. This is a surprisingly difficult structure to film, the location of the sculpture is accessible, but filming from the surrounding infrastructure, can be complex and you need to be aware of possible mugging scenarios as well as navigating the traffic, both pedestrian and cars.

The use of the grid system, to re-order the captured footage will be the central focus of development within this project. Whilst there remain 2 days of filming to do, the treatments that have been carried out to date, look to have identified a direction of investigation that will encapsulate the project. Already some observations of the 'chaos' of the subject are proving challenging. Traffic fills the full frame, the surrounding architecture is complex and visually chaotic. The main challenge for this project is to defy all common perceptions of the Elephant and Castle and generate something that could be considered 'beautiful' or as Vitruvius would have described it 'Venustas'.