What If Metropolis? OGR part 1

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  1. tutorphil1:09 pm, November 05, 2016

    Hey Rhia,

    So Kandinsky - the artist who painted what we 'heard'! It's for this reason, I found your travelogue - though entertaining (and I loved the idea of the hot air balloons) - to be strangely missing the concept of music as a theme. It does seem as if Kandinsky was designing a city, he might use music as the DNA of his vision. Where possible, I'm suggesting students try and walk in the same shoes as their collaborators when it comes to working up ideas for their digital sets - have you listened to any of the music that inspired Kandinsky to paint what he heard?

    "Kandinsky discovered his synaesthesia at a performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Moscow: "I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." In 1911, after studying and settling in Germany, he was similarly moved by a Schoenberg concert and finished painting Impression III (Konzert) two days later. The abstract artist and the atonal composer became friends, and Kandinsky even exhibited Schoenberg's paintings in the first Blue Rider exhibition in Munich in the same year."

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3653012/The-man-who-heard-his-paintbox-hiss.html

    Lohengrin:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcekLCkaP0A

    Schoenberg:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxgr8wZOI0g

    How about producing some quick digital paintings in response to some of this music - do as Kandinsky did. This would be an interesting approach to 'thinking and seeing' like Kandinsky...

    Another way to approach thinking about your city is thinking about how the noise signatures of specific types of places might help you design them in terms of shapes and colours in a Kandinsky-style? For example, using Kandinsky's principles, what shape/colour/texture would a cathedral be if the sounds we associate with a cathedral became the guiding principle of the design? What wold a railway station look like if it looked the way it sounded as a space? Personally, I think this might be more like working with your collaborator, as opposed to looking only at the paintings and the shapes he created in the past.

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  2. tutorphil1:10 pm, November 05, 2016

    You sort of have to 'be' Kandinsky as he's asked to design a city, as opposed to design a city out of Kandinsky's existing shapes? Does that make sense? Obviously there is a relationship, because it's clear from looking at his paintings, that certain colours and shapes reoccur - so he does establish a kind of alphabet of forms and colours as they associate with sound and music. One colour important to Kandinsky was blue:

    "If Kandinsky had a favourite colour, it must have been blue: "The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural… The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white."

    The other thing that is interesting about your travelogue is how I think you inject your confusion into the city - you describe a place that is difficult to understand, but you could argue that Kandinsky doesn't find his own pictures confusing - rather they represent a clear system, as I said, like an alphabet of forms that translate precisely the music inspiring the image. I wonder if you're writing this travelogue as a critique of Kandinsky (your own feelings about his work) - the people living there might understand the system very precisely. I can imagine how confusing the place would be for the new arrival however.

    I loved the idea of viewing Kandinsky's city by night - I can see that creating a lovely final digital set, what with all the opportunities for lighting and theatricality. I suppose in a city designed from music, perhaps the 'church' or the 'seat of power' would be the concert hall? Some origin point for all the music that built the city? Something to think about.

    Short version: try and engage with the idea of visualising sound and music in a more hands-on way (walking in Kandinsky's shoes) when it comes to thinking about thumb nailing and developing approaches to specific places. I also want you to look at actual architecture too, so you're not just thinking about your proposed structures as collections of shapes - I want you to think of them as constructions: in terms of thinking creatively about how you might get the abstraction into ideas about buildings, check out the category of Deconstructivism in architecture: some examples

    http://www.historiasztuki.com.pl/ilustracje/ARCHDEKONSTR/DK-L-RoyalOntarioMuseum2.jpg
    http://www.historiasztuki.com.pl/ilustracje/ARCHDEKONSTR/DK-Gehry-WfmStataCenter.jpg
    https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/8d/c3/fe/8dc3fe932080ed9a73873b0f7d507ec8.jpg

    The other association I get from Kandinsky's paintings is the translucency of a lot of his colours - the sense that surfaces are see-though or glass: so looking at glass architecture and contemporay stain glass in architecture may also be of some inspiration:

    http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_manrubiDe61qijolto1_1280.jpg
    http://cdn.thecoolist.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Sports-and-Leisure-Center-in-Saint-Cloud-France-1.jpg
    https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/60/d4/83/60d48340eff28b448d89519c1db7ab87.jpg
    https://esguk.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/coloured-glass1.jpg
    http://www.californiahomedesign.com/sites/default/files/styles/zoomtour/public/tour/1-stained-glass-airport-janney01.jpg?itok=nRvlqhZt


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