A reflection tonight. Why video, rather than say virtual reality or even on the other end of animation, a still image?
We really value cinema in our culture. We want to sit with somebody to watch moving images (we go to the cinema to be in a room full of others, the focal point of our living rooms is a tv in front of a couch). We seem to value the ability to discuss what we watched or experienced. Video is always something people can reference like “hey did you see this?” or “hey you should check this out because its a lot like this”. Something like VR doesn’t have any of that. The moment you put your goggles on, you close your entire world off to your own experience within that simulated setting. Its cool, but it isn’t nearly as communal.
So why video instead of static images? Movement/time seems to be a big reason why. It is a build up of images. A snapshot (say a vignette) can be interesting to look at but it’s a heavily curated moment. Video can be more honest than say a photograph or a vignette. It has to be many moments piled on each other. The careful curation is limited because of time passing. Our experience of the site is the boring, the mysterious, the surprising, the exciting, and everything in between. Not the moment when the birds flew perfectly across the horizon as somehow there were 15 perfectly dressed and posing photoshop cutout people hanging out in the site nobody usually visits.
This is why it is so hard to show people in this project so far, because our process of inventory has been honest about the tideflats. In design we love the idea of people furnishing our sites (and sure we should and it would be great) but how many times have we actually seen people at our site? The flats can be devoid of faces and this is the honest challenge of designing for the site. Video has just accentuated how empty the site can be. So, that is where we have to put our design hats on and think of how to activate these spaces for human scale experiences a bit more.
Lastly, video has made us resist the idea of a total. We always have to look at a moving image of a scene and the human scale. Its easy to jump into plan view when analyzing and designing a site. But what do people outside of the population that design and build understand in a plan? Sure it allows for something spatial which can come in handy for building, but what about the human scale? I feel like to sell an idea it is more pertinent to show the experience and not the total plan. Total plans always have mistakes and something that will have to be recalculated or redesigned – they are subject to minute scrutiny. Experiences are transcendental and binding – its something we can all relate to where we might have had a similar experience before. Its a connection to the audience. Its like performing a song versus giving the notation, or watching a play versus reading the script. Which makes you feel more? Which makes you connect more? Which allows for more flexibility and dialogue?