Fast Forward

Fast Forward
Author: Holly Willis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2016-08-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231850972

Cinema, the primary vehicle for storytelling in the twentieth century, is being reconfigured by new media in the twenty-first. Terms such as "worldbuilding," "virtual reality," and "transmedia" introduce new methods for constructing a screenplay and experiencing and sharing a story. Similarly, 3D cinematography, hypercinema, and visual effects require different modes for composing an image, and virtual technology, motion capture, and previsualization completely rearrange the traditional flow of cinematic production. What does this mean for telling stories? Fast Forward answers this question by investigating a full range of contemporary creative practices dedicated to the future of mediated storytelling and by connecting with a new generation of filmmakers, screenwriters, technologists, media artists, and designers to discover how they work now, and toward what end. From Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin's exploration of VR spherical filmmaking to Rebeca Méndez's projection and installation work exploring climate change to the richly mediated interactive live performances of the collective Cloud Eye Control, this volume captures a moment of creative evolution and sets the stage for imagining the future of the cinematic arts.

Fast Forward

Fast Forward
Author: Tim Harte
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2009-11-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0299233235

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and high-speed industrial machinery proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, a fascination with speed influenced artists—from Moscow to Manhattan—working in a variety of media. Russian avant-garde literary, visual, and cinematic artists were among those striving to elevate the ordinary physical concept of speed into a source of inspiration and generate new possibilities for everyday existence. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde artists with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for revolutionary experimentation. In Fast Forward Tim Harte presents a detailed examination of the images and concepts of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, visual arts, and cinema. His study illustrates how a wide variety of experimental artistic tendencies of the day—such as “rayism” in poetry and painting, the effort to create a “transrational” language (zaum’) in verse, and movements seemingly as divergent as neo-primitivism and constructivism—all relied on notions of speed or dynamism to create at least part of their effects. Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters. The embrace of speed after the 1917 Revolution, however, paradoxically hastened the movement’s demise. By the late 1920s, under a variety of historical pressures, avant-garde artistic forms morphed into those more compatible with the political agenda of the Russian state. Experimentation became politically suspect and abstractionism gave way to orthodox realism, ultimately ushering in the socialist realism and aesthetic conformism of the Stalin years.

Fast-Forward Urbanism

Fast-Forward Urbanism
Author: Dana Cuff
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2011-04-13
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781568989778

In the wake of recent failures in America's urban infrastructure, an emerging group of activist designers are calling on architects to rethink their relationship to the city. For them, the future of the American city lies not in modernism's large-scale master plans or new urbanism's nostalgic community planning. Instead, they favor working with the realities of urban space, finding hidden opportunities in what already exists in our cities; they eschew monolithic, top-down approaches. Fast-Forward Urbanism presents a mixture of essays, opinions, and design projects by well-known architects and theorists including Stan Allen, Will Alsop, Lars Lerup, and Keller Easterling. Equal partstheory and practice, their ideas lay the groundwork for the next American metropolis. Fast-Forward Urbanism will be a useful tool for designers as well as anyone working in the federal recovery effort, from policy-makers to engineers to builders to planners.

Masterplanning the Adaptive City

Masterplanning the Adaptive City
Author: Tom Verebes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2013-10-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1135055149

Computational design has become widely accepted into mainstream architecture, but this is the first book to advocate applying it to create adaptable masterplans for rapid urban growth, urban heterogeneity, through computational urbanism. Practitioners and researchers here discuss ideas from the fields of architecture, urbanism, the natural sciences, computer science, economics, and mathematics to find solutions for managing urban change in Asia and developing countries throughout the world. Divided into four parts (historical and theoretical background, our current situation, methodologies, and prototypical practices), the book includes a series of essays, interviews, built case studies, and original research to accompany chapters written by editor Tom Verebes to give you the most comprehensive overview of this approach. Essays by Marina Lathouri, Jorge Fiori, Jonathan Solomon, Patrik Schumacher, Peter Trummer, and David Jason Gerber. Interviews with Dana Cuff, Xu Wei Guo, Matthew Prior, Tom Barker, Su Yunsheng, and Brett Steele. Built case studies by Zaha Hadid Architects, James Corner Field Operations, XWG Studio, MAD, OCEAN Consultancy Network, Plasma Studio, Groundlab, Peter Trummer, Serie Architects, dotA, and Rocker-Lange Architects.

The Urbanism of Exception

The Urbanism of Exception
Author: Martin J. Murray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2017-03-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107169240

This book argues that understanding global urbanism in the twenty-first century requires us to cast our gaze upon vast city-regions without an urban core.

China Fast Forward

China Fast Forward
Author: Bill Dodson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2012-07-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118176359

Will China Surpass the United States as an innovation nation? China is tirelessly working to overcome its technological deficiencies by driving R&D initiatives in government and business and adapting Western Internet platforms for domestic use. It is extending its technological reach through a major drive to rival India as a services outsourcing leader and projecting its high-tech brands into the companies and homes of other countries. But whether China succeeds will depend on how it handles such issues as demography, energy dependency, and resource limitations. The environmental challenges posed by China's vast manufacturing sector are well documented, but what isn't widely realized is that China is actually outstripping the West in all manner of green initiatives, renewable energy investments, research and development funding, and other areas essential to improving the health of the planet. However, omnipresent government intervention, environmental degradation, natural resource exhaustion, and other issues threaten to derail China’s rise to superpower status. As the country meets global challenges on a scale that few nations can match, China Fast Forward takes a look at what lies ahead and why China’s success is important to us all. In this book, Bill Dodson explores China's reincarnation from a closed, agrarian nation into a modern, high-tech superpower bent on literally cleaning up its act. Presents an on-the-ground survey and analysis of China's renewable and clean energy sector that identifies the kinds of projects and technologies Chinese enterprises and local governments are hungry for Includes a discussion on how successful Chinese companies are developing their brands to go head-to-head with the world’s best-known companies Discusses how central government conflicts of interest are actually foiling corporate and official drives to innovation across a range of sectors Taking a look inside China's march toward becoming a sustainable superpower through innovation, China Fast Forward presents a balance sheet of the country's technological and social progress on its path to becoming a world leader.

Many Urbanisms

Many Urbanisms
Author: Martin J. Murray
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 693
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231555350

Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Now, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. But urbanization is accelerating in some places and slowing down in others. The sprawling megacities of Asia and Africa, as well as many other smaller and medium-sized cities throughout the “Global South,” are expected to continue growing. At the same time, older industrial cities in wealthier countries are experiencing protracted socioeconomic decline. Nonetheless, mainstream urban studies continues to treat a handful of superstar cities in Europe and North America as the exemplars of world urbanism, even though current global growth and development represent a dramatic break with past patterns. Martin J. Murray offers a groundbreaking guide to the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and complexity of contemporary global urbanism. He identifies and traces four distinct pathways that characterize cities today: tourist-entertainment cities with world-class aspirations; struggling postindustrial cities; megacities experiencing hypergrowth; and “instant cities,” or master-planned cities built from scratch. Murray shows how these different types of cities respond to different pressures and logics rather than progressing through the stages of a predetermined linear path. He highlights new spatial patterns of urbanization that have undermined conventional understandings of the city, exploring the emergence of polycentric, fragmented, haphazard, and unbounded metropolises. Such cities, he argues, should not be seen as deviations from a norm but rather as alternatives within a constellation of urban possibility. Innovative and wide-ranging, Many Urbanisms offers ways to understand the disparate forms of global cities today on their own terms.

The Unknown Cities

The Unknown Cities
Author: Abeer Elshater
Publisher: Partridge Africa
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1482862298

This book investigates the many relatively unknown Egyptian cities, which research has largely ignored. It seeks to enhance the livability of urban areas and stop the processes that turn residents into anti-utopians and their cities into dystopias. It examines urbanization patterns in what are currently rural or informal settlements. It draws on concepts from Western and Arabic thought concerning idealism and utopianism, linking anti-utopianism with ideas such as loss of hope and residents right to the city. It also investigates the epistemology and methodology of urban design, using the descriptive-analytical approach to evaluate methods of self-criticism to address the problems and enhance urban planning and design. The literature regarding ten-minute neighborhoods is reviewed, along with a comparative content analysis of online articles, and the resultant principles are tested through site observation. It is found that happiness can be promoted by the principle of ten-minute pedestrian access to essential services, which can viably guide the reformation of urban planning. This work recommends that urban planning should be based on the ten-minute neighborhood, thus improving the future prospects of utopianism in Egypts unknown cities. Recently, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, there was a definite human crisis that emerged in the Egyptian cities at the level of local urban communities, which reflects on the whole city and the attached ones. The problem seems to be in the transformation of some urban sites in the metropolitan [and small] cities to become dystopian places, regarding the dynamic impact of the anti-utopian people. The concept of anti-utopians stands as an intermediate step between livable cities and dystopian communities through the transformation that occurs due to the lack of strategic plans by the administrators and/or the experts, with a special mention to the plans for poor people. Therefore, from our perspective, there is an urgent need to say that the majority of Egyptian cities should be declared as domains of humanitarian disasters, which are caused by human hazards rather than the natural disasters, e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, whirlwinds, and hurricanes. Thus, the first/headmost city that will announce its failure in the structural and human scene will get the self-respect and worlds estimate as well.

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture
Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-04-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1472506871

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture brings together a respected team of philosophers and architecture scholars to ask what impact architecture has over today's culture and society. For three decades critical philosophy has been in discourse with architecture. Yet following the recent radical turn in contemporary philosophy, architecture's role in contemporary culture is rarely addressed. In turn, the architecture discourse in academia has remained ignorant of recent developments in radical philosophy. Providing the first platform for a debate between critics, architects and radical philosophers, this unique collection unties these two schools of thought. Contributors reason for or against the claim of the "missed encounter" between architecture and radical philosophy. They discuss why our prominent critical philosophers devote stimulating writings to the ideological impact of arts on the contemporary culture - music, literature, cinema, opera, theatre - without attempting a similar comprehensive analysis of architecture. By critically evaluating recent philosophy in relation to contemporary architecture, The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture presents a thorough understanding of the new relationship between architecture and radical philosophy.