Monday

Thanks all for the meeting on Friday.

There were a few clear things that came out of the meeting for me,

1. No more talk without images (sounds like advice we give to students). We need to visualize first and edit second.
2. We are/were being far too conservative
3. We agree to start on the presentation materials now, and work back to content to some degree.
4. The political/cultural/social framing at this point is a merry go round, we should look at one thing more deeply to focus these concerns/critiques later
5. We are there to promote ourselves and by extension UTS. To some degree the expectation is that we will do something overtly digital, whether we should or not was unclear.
6. Split on the position question. Storm the barricades (Adrian) or implicit positioning (Charles) seemed to be the two options.
7. No ownership. At the moment, no one is taking any ownership for a variety of reasons.

So with all this in mind, I want to put a few things to the group.

Logistics

1. I’m going to contact the Instiutute for Sustainable futures to have a meeting about the comp. If you are interested to join me for that conversation with them, please let me know.
2. I’m also going to contact Michael Hill of the Digital Animation and see if we cant get some involvement from some talented animators for the second part of the presentation (ie feb 20 to show time) If you have any ideas about who or concerns with this let me know today.
3. We essentially have three weeks to go till the design work is done. I’m going to put out a call for more hands to help with this.
4. Gerard has offered to do another review at the end of this week at his office. I think we should take him up and use it as a deadline for some imagery.

So with the clock ticking loudly, I’m going to start on this basis because it seems the most interesting to me at this point.

The distributed energy question. Buildings producing their own energy, creates re-balance of control over infrastructure, and requires that the suburbs articulate themselves into power co-op’s. This balkanizes the burbs into micro settlements of power production. Also give us a way to update the suburban image through a Neural net type of connection diagram rather than a belt (perhaps)

The reason I think this is the way to go with the design is that

1. it doesn’t discount any of the city as Asian safe tourist ideas that we spoke of
2. it has a direct architectural consequence at both a building and urban scale (we can design something now)
3. it does lead us into a scenario of power (control) re-distribution as a function of the green solution

I want to use the l-systems turtle script to get into the neural distribution patterns, and then develop the scenes for the A1’s. I hope to have them sketched out as a teaser by the end of the week.

A little sketch is attached for comment. Doesn’t really deal with what I’ve just written, but was the kind of belt idea. Too obviously a sci-fi we know, or is there some merit in chasing this down?

Also really recommend looking at the “we love to build” images (link on the blog) as a potential way to portray this. Also to that end, the “Terminus City” brochure that was part of the propaganda for the upcoming film “the signal” has potential as a form.

I’ll post this to the blog as well.

As always.. let me know your thoughts.

Ant