cityofsound

Essays: Interfaces for the unlimited dream of flying

Flying from Singapore to Helsinki. We’re flying over an apparently endless landscape of dark forests and snow-covered hills, presumably Russia, rendered indigo in the velvety pre-dawn light. Settlements are picked out by clusters of yellowy-orange lights, connected by a vast web of white lines, roads and rail cutting through the trees and rock.

Most landscapes are transcendental from an airliner; Australia’s are particularly transcendental, if that makes any kind of sense. Flying up from Adelaide, towards Singapore, we pass over what I think is Lake Eyre, a body of water that is only sometimes water, a 10000 square kilometre salt pan.

It’s as if Australia’s terrain is designed to be seen from the air. From the ground, as Robert Hughes and others have pointed out, Australia’s landscape has a beauty of its own, but it is not one that can be easily drawn from the lens of western aesthetics. From the air, however, the vastness of its systems can be quickly appreciated. It’s beyond Burtynsky.

Similarly, flying into Singapore, we can sense the scale of the world’s economic systems, as with most of the eastern cities at this point. The water is full of tankers, container ships and smaller freighters, queuing to get into the port, patterns stretching towards the horizon. As the dark waters give way to land, suddenly everything is the pristine green of manicured golf courses, peppered with clubhouses.

As I said at the time:

Flying into Singapore under steely skies; sea full of container ships, land full of golf courses. Entire history of modernity right there.

— Dan Hill (@cityofsound) March 25, 2012

Of course this transcendental, strategic scale hits the all-too-down-to-earth reality of airports at some point; well, at numerous points. I started writing this in the altered realities of Singapore Changi airport, but when I got to Adelaide, on Integrated Design Commission business, I saw an artwork by the Russian collective AES+F which further “unpacked” the experience of airport—as purgatory—in "Allegoria Sacra" (2010-11)

At the Art Gallery of South Australia, in a wonderfully-curated 'International Art Series' show alongside pieces by the Chapman Brothers, Goya and a 16th century Japanese screen depicting a civil war, "Allegoria Sacra"is difficult to describe in terms of content—we were fortunate enough to be given a superb, florid and articulate introduction to the piece by gallery director, Nick Mitzevich, which took around ten minutes—but technically it consists of a 39-minute three-channel projection, composed essentially of animated digital stills at the scale of a gigantic tableau (this was apparently projected from the street, onto the gallery itself, for the opening; a smart attempt to turn this archetypal Victorian interiorised ‘house of art’ inside out.) Everything is in this piece; do take the chance to see it, if you can, in Adelaide or anywhere else. This video gives a hint of it, but no more, obviously. You have to sit down in front of this thing and soak it in:

I’ve written about airports many times before, finding them endlessly fascinating, but a year or so ago, I wrote a piece for Domus that focused more on the experience of flying an aircraft—which I’ve never done, I should hasten to add (not that this stopped me from writing it). But the editor (Joseph Grima) asked me to write something about the developments in interfaces for flying, aka avionics. It sat alongside an article by an aviation expert which focused more on the developments in aircraft design, but I was to take an interaction designer’s point-of-view on the design of the avionics systems interfaces.

Here I also wanted to capture the sense of an interface’s possibilities: not merely in the functional, but also in conveying the sensation of flying — which is present as a passenger, never mind a pilot. This, despite the relatively mundane outcomes of avionics design, which are quite rightly risk-managed to the hilt. Hence the allusion to Ballard’s extraordinary book, "The Unlimited Dream Company", amongst other things. That particular allusion should also suggest that this is a fairly exploratory, speculative piece.

There are a lot of question marks in this piece, perhaps tellingly, and as ever, this is the longer original edit, not seen in the magazine version—the ’30 Rock auto-pilot' edit.

Journal: 'Bullitt', 'Drive' and walking the LA River

I’m in a hotel room in Adelaide watching Bullitt on Fox Classics. I flipped channel to find myself right at the start of the famous car chase scene. I must have seen this scene around 50 times. I had this movie on VHS, when one had such things, and used to know the exact time to fast forward to. I've just realised that, as a non-driver, perhaps this was a form of sublimation.

For what is not a great movie, by most measures, Bullitt is an influential film. What it gave us is more textural than textual. It has its moments—the car chase most obviously—but delivers moods and stylings rather than narrative or structural innovation: the blankness of McQueen; his look, and that of Jacqueline Bisset’s; Lalo Schifrin’s score; the pace of the cop movies of the following decade, involving laborious observation of detectives at work; the way that San Francisco is shot, including some handheld but also carefully sanitised of any of the social ferment present in the city in 1968.

The chase scene has three lead characters, none of which are human: McQueen’s Ford Mustang Fastback; the bad guys’ Dodge Charger; and the city itself. The actors are, in the words of Alfred Hitchcock, treated like cattle, mere action figures swapping places with the scenery, the latter foregrounded over the former. The scene won an Academy Award for best editing, but the sound design is also strong, with the explosive roar of the engines still quite shocking. They’re like external combustion engines.

Not the full chase, but close. There are hundreds of tributes and reedits on YouTube, including dull attempts at recreation, recreated in Lego, in Hot Wheels, or in Matchbox, and the ultimate accolade, a reference in The Simpsons. See also this obsessive comparison of then and now.

On the flight on the way to Adelaide, I watched Drive, at Boyer’s recommendation. This, in some ways, features contemporary Los Angeles as a character, much as Michael Mann’s Collateral did. As Mann noted, digital HD camera technology enables Los Angeles, that city of electric lights, to be ‘properly’ shot at night, and both Drive’s and Collateral’s best driving scenes are at night (whereas Bullitt’s San Francisco has rarely looked so sunny.)

Drive’s Ryan Gosling has the same studied impassive voidery of McQueen, actually ramping up the mute to new levels somehow. The driving is just as good as Bullitt, or indeed Collateral, which is at least one large part of what these movies are about. The city is the other part. Drive is a portrait of LA, just as Collateral was (and many more before it, as discussed in that old Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality post.) 

I enjoyed it hugely, as I tend to when movies are portraits of cities, rendered through mood and texture, actors as cattle.

One scene—in that hazy golden LA sunlight, actually—features the Los Angeles River as the backdrop for some mild Gosling-on-Carey Mulligan flirtation. They get out of the car, and throw stones in one of those pools of water significant enough to throw stones into, amidst the wild scrubby foliage that grows through cracks in the giant concrete culvert that forms the body of the modern river.

“Nic wanted something different and romantic for [Driver and Irene] to do. I’d heard that you can actually drive up the L.A. River,” Gosling recalled. “So we tried it, and it worked—until we got to this one spot where out of nowhere there was this patch of shrubs and trees and you couldn’t go any further. There was no reason for it to be there. It was kind of magical.” (LA Times)

Here’s the scene, 1’25” in. Again, there are lots of videos of people driving the LA River at YouTube, for example these kids, but also some kid doing commentary on driving it the river in the video game LA Noire.)

It’s a similar setting to that the impromptu "happening" I wrote about a few years ago, when I first figured out there was such a thing as the LA River. And of course the river has been the setting for numerous other movies.

Seeing this unique infrastructure again in Drive inspired me to dig out my notes on the LA River, half-written a couple of years ago. Here they are: