This video was kindly made by one of the participants in the Bike In Film Screening, and shows the mass Moonlit Bike Ride from Static Gallery down to the opening night of SCAN, 15 September 2008.

The screening, “The Living City” was curated by Jacqueline Passmore and included a programme of short experimental films about the city and urban navigation, including works by Ken Paul Rosenthal, Neil Grant, Rebecca Lennon, Semiconductor, and Masaki Hosokawa.

Hello everyone,

Here is a 10 minute documentation piece of the SCAN installation in Liverpool. 

Here is a short video clip (a little dark) from last nights opening of SCAN which is part of AUDIOVISION – this weeks great sound and visual festival in Liverpool, curated by Hannah Peel.  Me, Jeff and Jackie are all very happy with the piece and believe it adds a striking addition to the cityscape and architecture of the city.

More video to come..

As this project has been evolving over the past weeks so has the nature of the name. SCAN refers to “ray”, as in light of cinema and the moving image, speed, X-Ray – which we see as part of our piece in a way – the “looking” through a building, and the inside.

“Scanning” the city” , ”Scanning” the building”.

Xray and cinema are closely linked in the way they are both forms of imaging that scan, examine and document our physical matter. It also refers even more to the actual site and the building.

It looks like the audio element of the installation will be done through lo-fi FM radio transmissions which makes the title even more conceptually interesting

As in the transmission of “scanning” the ether for the soundscape.

scan  (skn)

v. scanned, scan·ning, scans v.tr.

1. To examine closely.

2. To look over quickly and systematically: scanning the horizon for signs of land.

3. To look over or leaf through hastily: scanned the newspaper while eating breakfast.

4. To analyze (verse) into metrical patterns.

5. Electronics

a. To move a finely focused beam of light or electrons in a systematic pattern over (a surface) in order to reproduce or sense and subsequently transmit an image.

b. To move a radar beam in a systematic pattern over (a sector of sky) in search of a target.

6. Computer Science To search (stored data) automatically for specific data.

7. Medicine To examine (a body or body part) with a CAT scanner or similar scanning apparatus.

8. To digitally encode (text, for example) with an optical scanner.

v.intr.

1. To analyze verse into metrical patterns.

2. To conform to a metrical pattern.

3. Electronics To undergo electronic scanning.

n.

1. The act or an instance of scanning.

2. Scope or field of vision.

a. Examination of a body or body part by a CAT scanner or similar scanning apparatus.

b. A picture or image produced by this means.

4. A single sweep of the beam of electrons across a television screen

A little less than 2 weeks until the installation and we are back with some blog activity. Previsualizing an installation and projection on this scale has been a huge challenge for all of us. We created a “mock-up” in Isadora, a software and programming environment for live video. We have used it to simulate ideas and visual concepts within the software, which will be part of our live manipulation. Here is a first look at how we envision our material (preshot urban footage, archival, pedestrian, architectural) to conceptually and visually project.

My first day back in Liverpool was spent at the Main Library looking at old maps of the Mersey Tunnel. In the past weeks the library personnel unearthed a map they did not know existed within their archives. Seeing librarians giggly with excitement is lovely and the opening of the cannister containing the map was like a ceremony.

Digging deeper into the urban archeology of all aspects of the Air Vent building and the tunnel.

In 1920’s, the city became the subject of a number of landmark films that shaped the body of the cine city in important ways. These include Manhatta (1921), Metropolis (1926) and The Man with The Movie Camera (1929).

Looking at these panoramas form an architectural perspective, the city emerges both as something more than and something different form the mere objects of films. Here, metropolis and film interface as a distinctly modern production in which a correspondence between the city space and the film space, between the motion of the city and the moving image, exists. The machine of modernity that fabricated the city is also the “fabric” of film. The 1920’s, a period full of fluid exchange between architecture, created a nexus investing the actual mechanics of the bond.

The modern architectural model of film even came to be projected onto the architecture of the movie house itself.

As a view from the body, film is architecturally bound: sized to the body, experienced from life, architecture is haptically imaged and mobilized. Architecture is neither static structure not simply just built. Like all tangible artifacts, it is actually constructed – imaged – as it is manipulated. And like a film, architecture is built as is constantly negotiated by (e)motions, traverersed by the histories both of its inhabitants and its transient dwellers. Seen in this way, architecture reveals urban ties; the product of transactions, it bears the traces of urban (e)motion and its fictional scriptings. A relation is established between places and events that forms and transforms the narrative of a city: the city itself becomes imaged as narrative as sites are transformed by the sequence of movements of its traveler-dwellers. Film, a principal narrator of city space. Provides the very fictional dynamics of the urban text. As with all urban forms of traversal, its image-movement continually reinvents places as sites of narrative. Cities are filmic afterimages imprinted on our own spatial unconscious.

From Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film – Guliana Bruno