Sampling
"Sampling in essence is when you include an element of a pre-existing recording by someone else in your composition. The sample can be anything that you've 'sampled' from another track; a rhythm, a melody, a beat, vocals or speech, which you then manipulate, edit, chop up or loop to fit creatively within your work."
Below are the notes and script I wrote to follow during the lecture.
1. Introduction:
a. (2) The name of this talk is Sampling
i. What sampling means is the technique of digitally encoding music or sound and reusing it as part of a composition or recording.
ii. Sampling is a term that is rarely spoken in terms of the built environment but has everything to do with the way we have begun to design today
iii. This stems from the idea that nothing is necessarily novel in design today.
b. Two other terms that have a very close relationship to this term are Object and Context
c. If we think of the idea of sampling as taking one sound, or in this case object, and reformatting it, repurposing it, and placing it into a new context, we get a form of Sampling that is applicable in our own design language.
2. Climbing Wall
a. (3) For the first project I will show, it is the first time I really began to pull at the elements of Sampling, Object, and Context.
b. (3) It was an independent study at the University of Pennsylvania where I studied the familiar formal, textural, and material elements at various scales, blurring the boundary of human and natural
c. (4) It all started with the collection of satellite imagery of different natural phenomena around the world.
i. A canyon in a US desert
ii. Cloud formations somewhere over the arctic
iii. Or even mountains on Mars
d. (5) Second I began to pull out different formal techniques derived from the figures I had seen or pulled out of the images.
i. Some, such as the third image on this page, were completely different but had some relation to the built environment at a completely different scale.
e. (6) The beginning of the inspiration was to curate and hybridize the elements of built and natural to create a composition of material and form that could be somewhere between render, photo, or scan of some object.
f. (7) From there the process was to edit, manipulate, and repurpose the images to create a composition that had no scale, no place, no material, but yet seemed so familiar
i. This image has elements of natural and built, symmetrical, asymmetrical, and becomes an interesting way to blur the boundary of real and fiction.
g. (8) Lastly was to begin to bring it back to a scale and a color palette that lends itself to potential building materials such as concrete, stone, or plaster.
h. (9) I was interested in the figural qualities of certain elements within the collages, so I began to pull out qualities such as near-symmetry and offsets, similar to the canyons and natural formations.
i. (10) Through section, I studied the formation of void through Booleans and intersections. Thus manipulating the scalar qualities of the spaces. Leaving a range of interconnected voids and openings.
j. (11-13) And this is the final result, somewhere between rock formation and building.
i. The idea was not to aim for architecture, but to aim for structure with the potential to inhabit.
ii. With the aim to create an architecture, sometimes you have preconceptions that limit the end possibilities.
3. Tampere Central Deck and Arena – Tampere, Finland
a. (14) For the next project, I wanted to share a piece of myself from the other side of the spectrum, something built.
i. I cannot take credit for this project, there were many people who worked on it before me, and a whole team in Finland that made it possible.
ii. But this project was a large focus of mine working at Studio Libeskind.
b. (15) The project is located in Tampere, Finland, the second largest city in Finland.
i. It is an ice hockey arena as well as 5 residential towers.
ii. The arena opened this past December and the towers will continue to build for some time. Two of them are already up but not finished.
iii. The project is based on an idea of disrupted continuity and fragmentation that, in formation, creates a whole.
c. (16) Looking through some of the sketches by Daniel, you can see the connection through a singular gesture….
i. Continue to describe the project through these terms.
d. (17) This relates directly to the artwork that Daniel had become famous for and this reference image comes from his Chamberworks Series finished in 1983 while he worked at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
i. His relationship between music and structure was extremely important throughout all of his work. But this was my first exposure to how the concept was applied through a collection of buildings
ii. Describe the image
e. (18) This leads to the continuity and discontinuity of some of his works as a collection of elements that instantiate a whole
f. (19-23)
i. These are a collection of renderings and photographs of the finished building.
ii. As you can see the connection of points, lines, and planes through space and the coherent whole that it makes, directly relates to the artwork
iii. Almost like the images brought to life
4. Real fictions
a. (24) This next project is back to another academic work, done at the same time as the first project, where I began to explore the concept of context and familiarity through form
b. (25) The project was placed in Cairo, on the banks of the Nile river where we studied the urban infrastructure that makes up the major connections of the city from East to West.
i. These three images were all taken during my trip there where we explored many different areas and aspects of Egypt and a few major cities
ii. The left image was taken at a Church within a predominantly Christian community called the Zabbaleen.
iii. The term literally translates to Garbage People because the people within this neighborhood were responsible and created a micro-economy based on trash collection.
iv. The second is an image of a Mosque entrance within the city of Cairo which shows one of the most important formal elements, the muqarna.
1. The Muqarna is an arch motif that is repeated multiple times to create interesting formal patterns usually at entrances and entry halls of mosques
v. The Third image is of a Temple ruin along the Nile river in the northern city of Aswan.
c. (26) Within our own site, we recreated specific elements that we saw and recorded with as much detail and precision as possible.
i. There was going to be moments where we could not understand where a door went, or a path continued, so we began to create and make them up.
ii. We also focused on familiar elements and began to manipulate these and amplify them, blurring between fact and fiction.
iii. Describe the images a bit more
d. (27-31) Describe the images
i. The overall concept was to explore relationships between the objects and elements we had seen through the trip
ii. We began to play with scale of patterns and forms
iii. We also started to break free from traditional forms of representation to amplify the feeling of extraction or removing objects from their context.
5. Design Research
a. (33) As a final wrap up of the work I wanted to show, I have put together some of the things I have been working on over the past year or so.
b. These words on the right of the page all relate to my own vocabulary that I have extracted through the projects I have just presented.
c. Each term is full of meaning for me.
i. Some, such as Low-res versus high-res or real versus manipulated, relate to processes or combinations I focus on to create interesting hybrids of familiar elements.
ii. The Last term is also something that I have begun to chase but haven’t yet fully explored. Hyper-real or the ability to get something to be so close to reality, that it almost is seen as real without question.
d. (35) This image was a competition entry where I was a finalist that tasked in creating a hyperloop facility in the desert of Las Vegas.
i. The actual project is not important, but the resulting images are meant to blur the boundary between real and fake, natural and man-made
ii. In fact, this first collage is a combination, in the same way as the first project I showed, with multiple scales of photos and renderings hybridized together.
e. (36) The plan also shows an attempt to create some sort of realism but also play with composition as this facility spreads itself out into the landscape almost like a plant or a animal.
f. (37-39) Describe the images quickly as attempts to create a fully digital but fully atmospheric environment.
6. (41-42) I will end with four images that move into the direction that I am exploring now and that is the space between landscape and architecture, man-made and natural, and between context and object.
a. When exploring the creation of objects in a combinatory sort of way, I have ended up creating interesting hybrids that begin to fuse all the elements I have discovered along the way in a much more direct and geometry way.
7. (43-44)This has lead to my newest exploration of the space between city and landscape.
a. Where landscapes begin to manipulate cities at the same time as cities manipulate landscapes.
b. They become one in the same and the qualities of one leave imprints directly on the qualities of others.
8. And if I can come full circle, this is where the concept of sampling has lead me in terms of how to create objects that both reference and repeat other familiar elements, completely bridging the gap between object and its context.
9. Because in these studies, I believe the object has become the context and the meaning is not reliant on a previous memory of either but is entirely new.