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Sol Price School of Public Policy |
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MEDIA in the SERVICE of SOCIAL SCIENCE = |
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We have photographed the facades of 850+ institutions. |
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PORT OF LA/LB (More Port Photographs) |
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Click on above ▲to see an example from the Boyle Heights neighborhood in eastern Los Angeles. |
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Urban Tomography Krieger on Tomography
Under rubrics of visual and aural documentation, the urban cellphonium, and now urban radiology or urban tomography, I see my project as developing ways of documenting a city in terms of multiple slices (hence, tomography) in space and in time and in type, a unity in that multiplicity of aspectival variations (a phenomenology), showing how people, machinery, and nature work together or coordinate to get the city’s work done (a choreography). I do experiments in fieldwork urban tomography using several people, each equipped with a video cellphone, swarming over a scene, their videos automatically downloaded by the cellphone’s WiFi to a server and shown in a multipanel display (as in CAT-scans). So the cellphones are what is sometimes called “embedded networked sensors.” Diderot (1760), Marville (1860), and Atget (1915) did much the same for Paris, albeit in single images, yet in systematic surveys and multiples. The assumption is that ordinary everyday life, in its tissue of negligible detail, is rich and deep. There’s always lots of “room at the bottom” [Feynman] for inquiry and appreciation.
In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant took on the skeptical tradition that denies that we might have complete and total knowledge of the world, by making clear what we might mean by scientific knowledge. Such knowledge is a product of our faculties and their capacities, and, as important, the logic of our thoughtways. We cannot have knowledge of things in themselves, only as they are for us. There are limits to what we can know, limits to certainty and completeness, and that by staying within those boundaries we can have scientific knowledge. What can we know about a city and its sensorium? I am here concerned with aspects of the city that are available to sight and sound, although smell, taste, and touch often enhance those senses. And I shall argue that it is through tomography that such knowledge is best evidenced. Tomography is many slices or aspects or perspectives on the world, claiming they are picturing the same thing, albeit from different angles. In effect, it is a claim that there is unity in multiplicity, identity in manifolds (the claim of phenomenology). Whether that tomogram is of the brain in a CAT-scan or of the heart in an echocardiogram, or images of the facades of 850 storefront houses of worship in Los Angeles, what we are offered is a multiplicity of images claiming to be about the same thing. Our task is to combine these slices into a reconstruction of that thing, whatever it is: whether that be done through computational devices, or in our minds through conceptual or visual imagination. Actually, what happens is a filling-in of details. Such aspectival variations always presume we have some idea of what we are looking at already (the particular organ or thing) as we examine each image separately to fill in the details. Tufte points out that such a manifold or multiplicity, what he calls “small multiples,” allow us to readily ask “compared to what?,” they provide “information slices . . . within an eyespan, and . . . uninterrupted visual meaning.” Tomography provides us with such identity in manifolds, many images showing us a world or an object as we encounter it from different aspects—allowing for that filling-in.
The work draws on the cinematic arts in its concerns with multiple slices and cuts, compositing, storytelling (?), and screen language. The work also draws from opera, where the claim is that music, sound, and visual action form an indissoluble whole. In both cases, there is also the claim that Nth viewings are rewarding, your noticing and appreciating new stuff each time around as well as what you have already taken in. Both also allow for multiple scenes on the same proscenium or screen, each playing against the other. Compare and contrast is ubiquitous. Now, continuity matters, whether in space or in time or both, so conventional editing is not an option—the boring or problematic visual or scene might be accompanied by useful audio. To encompass cross-talk and interaction in the sound and singing, we use multichannel sound or multiple singers in an aria, each channel having its own source, the source’s location corresponding to the person or image producing it.
Tomography is a method of studying objects by taking slices of them. A tomograph is a knifelike device meant to cut thin slices of tissue. Computer-aided tomography uses thin almost-one-dimensional x-ray images or slices/pencils of an object, to construct a two-dimensional image of a slice of an object, and presumably those slices can then be fit together to get a three-dimensional model of the object. As for types, photographs of the facades of many storefront churches give us a “feel” for the archetypal church. As for process, we might photograph the various aspects of the casting operation in a foundry to get a feel for the whole process.
Urban situations are complex, varied, and have many aspects. To document a street market we need images from various perspectives, but also of various transactions, of the insides of the booths, etc. And it would help to interview the various participants to find out what is not envisionable. Fortunately, there are cheap pervasive embedded networkable sensors now available and sufficiently ubiquitous to document urban life, to provide a very large number of slices or aspects. Namely, video-equipped cellphones are such sensors, and they are carried about all the time. We might imagine a swarm of such users deciding to document an event or situation, each from their own perspective or interest. While the sound would not be sharply focused, the images are directed. Were we to have cellphones with GPS, and with some sort of compass, we would be able to know the point of view of each sensor, and so begin to be able to do a reconstruction. Unfortunately, unlike the body or the Earth, the everyday world is not at all predictable or simple. But, like the body or the Earth, lots is hidden behind other stuff. Now, imagine having those cell phones equipped with data service as well as a broadband WiFi connection. The phones might send each video clip, tagged with the name of the user and the time, date, and place and direction of viewing, to a central server. To some extent we might rely on a person to then fit together the images, in her mind—the images already now labeled and organized by location and time--so as to see the whole that is presented aspectivally, in both space and in time. Our current work is at our Urban Tomography site. Ideally, she has already done fieldwork herself, so she has some idea of what the world is like. She does not start out with a tabula rasa, but rather with a sense of what there is in a city, and can fill-in and modify her initial notions, check them out, and learn more. So urban tomography leads to a fuller sense of place and activity. |
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DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND POWER All 150+ sites. Electricity Distribution Station #43 |
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STOREFRONT HOUSES OF WORSHIP IN LOS ANGELES |
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Vernacular Visual Merchandising Ethnic Markets in Los Angeles |
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Worksites in LOS ANGELES: 240+ Sites |
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ELECTRICAL SITES OF THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES |
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PROJECTS: Urban Tomography |
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Interstitial Flora in the Urban Hardscape |
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——————————————- QUONSET HUTS IN EL SEGUNDO Perhaps 150,000 Quonset Huts were built during WWII, and there were many more built subsequently. In the city of El Segundo, CA, there is a small industrial area just south of the Chevron Refinery (El Segundo). Several Quonset huts have now been refurbished, sometimes for business and industry, sometimes for more domestic uses.
From an industrial street toward the refinery |
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University of Southern California |