The Architecture Of PerformanceAuthor(s): Alex McDowellSource: Log, No. 10 (Summer/Fall 2007), pp. 65-69, 37Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765161 .

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Alex McDowell The Architecture

Of Performance

The production designer has the task of creating the architec- ture of a film. Although this is somewhat similar to the prac- tice of "real world" architecture of spaces and structures, the architecture of film works only with the raw material of time, narrative, history, light, and context; these are the

building blocks of film design. All these elements of design provide a frame for the director's vision and the script, and serve as a visual support for the actors' performances.

The connective tissue between the elements that drive character and the film's audience is narrative and environ- mental context. The production designer channels cultural references that allow the audience to inhabit the space of the film by introducing a layered and contagious viewpoint. Production design needs to be infected by culture, history, economic conditions, science, and art in order to resonate with its users and the audience. Not only is it impossible to create "pure" design outside of influence, it is essential to the design process to throw oneself into harm's way and to embrace various contaminants. Using a few examples from various films I have designed, I will try to illustrate the notion that film designers revel in the impure.

In The Terminal , what appears to be the emulation of real architecture is actually a disguise for the creation of a fictional space, of the setting for a fantasy. In the narrative, a central character, played by Tom Hanks, comes to America as a tourist and, due to a specific set of political misadventures, is forced to spend 11 months living in an airport terminal, where he not only comes to terms with a world alien to him, but also brings together its disparate inhabitants. The story- is a fairy-tale, but within a realistic setting that the audience can identify with. Although we were building it from the ground up as an original design, we decided that the terminal should be a synthesis of highly familiar architectural airport design, to the point of cliche. So we took the formal language of airplane architecture, like the wings and overhead bag- gage compartments, and the retail design of contemporary airport architecture, and mashed it all together. We created a space that, in its true purpose, was less architecture and more a container of the fairy-tale narrative, a gigantic light 65

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Set for The Terminal , 2005. All IMAGES COURTESY THE AUTHOR.

box designed to hold a thousand extras per day and to sus- tain three months of shooting, and then, once its image was embedded in the silver nitrate, be destroyed.

Currently I am working on a film about bees that are

four-legged, drive cars, and live in a hive in Central Park, and who, as it turns out, have a more sophisticated society than ours. It is a digital animation called Bee Movie [color- plate $], written and produced by Jerry Seinfeld. How does one design a beehive that contains a town, a honey factory, suburbs, and a stratified society that must appear neither

entirely futuristic nor based on human architecture, but could be the basic language of this fictional bee world? I looked to art and architecture that drew from the organic, and found it in a combination of Art Nouveau, the architec- ture of Erich Mendelsohn and Ushida Findlay, the photogra- phy of Karl Blossfeldt, and the sculpture of Lee Bontecou. Combined with the transmissive and material properties of wax and honey, these sources drive a new approach to the

apiary that is both fantastic and "believable," because it draws from known, if diverse, references.

The other project I am working on now is a futuristic, robotic opera called Death and the Powers, based at the MIT Media Lab. It is a brand new opera, with music by avant-

garde composer Tod Machover, who is the head of the Hyper- instruments Group at the Media Lab; libretto by Robert

Pinsky, the former poet laureate; and robots by Cynthia Breazeal, head of the Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab. The central character, Simon Powers, is a sort of Howard Hughes figure who has spent his life and fortune

creating the means to the next stage of human evolution - "The System" - which will allow him (and humankind after him) to implant his being into a virtual state, a transition into

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Still from Bee Movie , 2007.

immateriality and immortality. The stage set of Simon Powers' library suggests a repository of memory; the space that contains the artifacts also represents the character, his

history, and the future "System." The set has to physically evolve into a cellular system. The walls that first appear as a

library transform into a kind of giant mainframe computer, which absorbs each of the performers throughout the opera. We took a mix of meanings and sources, from Louise Nevelson to Rachel Whiteread, as well as layers of scientific, mechanical, and cultural iconography, to create the sense that those forms can become both metaphorical performers and musical implements.

We faced a similar "future" design problem with Steven

Spielberg's Minority Reporty set in Washington DC in 2054, in an

apparently benign, even Utopian world. Due to the telepathic powers of three "precogs," DC is the focus of an experiment by a new police division called "precrime," which uses the precogs to eradicate murder and serious crime. As a result there has been a population spike in the capital, and a massive vertical

city has sprung up within the telepathic radius of the precogs, but outside DC and its strict zoning laws.

Precrime is a transparent space to house the police of the future, who have nothing to hide in this Utopian society. But there is actually an opaque core at its center, which contains the precogs, who float within an egglike form hidden from

plain sight. The precrime/precog set represents the narrative

design of the whole film - the precog bomb explodes in the center of this political situation and the ripples oscillate

throughout the entire story. The chance meeting between

Greg Lynn's extreme design process and Issey Miyake's pleat- ed architectural haute couture had a powerful influence on the design of the chamber that contained the prescient pre- cogs. Greg also inspired us to use Maya, and its animation

capabilities take the narrative mix of womb and sound cham- ber to the level of physical structure. We sent the Maya model to San Francisco, where a manufacturer cut all of the

unique curved and carved CNC panels and then shipped them back to the Los Angeles stage, where they were assembled from a computer-created kit of parts. We took the notion of three intersecting ripple (Tbrainwave) patterns as if created by the precogs, and then adjusted the wavelength to make highly complex surfaces entirely created by mathematics.

To create a convincing future world of greater Wash- ington DC, we had to tune into the noise of today and extract certain threads to weave a new, resonant narrative. We creat- ed a stratified urban plan that established the historical city as

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Scenes from Minority Report, 2002.

old money, while on the other side of the Potomac a vertical

city - Mall City - would rise to accommodate the growing population. As this city grew vertically it started connecting horizontally into giant malls in the sky, reducing the amount of light that penetrates to the lower levels, and creating a lower social strata with less value in terms of corporate mar-

keting. This therefore becomes a place of escape. We built a

complete world with its own interior logic, within which the linear film narrative could find its thread. Once you have a vertical city, how do you get around? We came up with a car called the Maglev, which was the main element of a trans-

portation system that could travel both vertically and hori-

zontally in the city, and would operate something like a com- bined elevator and taxicab. This transportation system was a

by-product of our attempt to investigate how space could work in this world. Stemming from our research, we created a narrative space that could be appropriated within the con- text of the story, and the escape of the character played by Tom Cruise.

To consider cultural possibilities, we looked at today's Internet and extrapolated that in our "future," the informa- tional "assault" will increasingly take place in our private environments. For example, when you visit Amazon.com, it will know who you are, what books you like, what music

you like, what food you like, and virtually what you will do next. We took that notion into consumer retail space: all of Mall City is intelligent and able to identify and individually market products to the individuals traveling through it.

The police in this apparently benign world are actually

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Precog core from Minority RePORTj 2002.

Alex McDowell is a production DESIGNER SPECIALIZING IN THE INTEGRATION OF DIGITAL TECHNOL- OGY AND TRADITIONAL DESIGN TECHNIQUE. HE IS A FOUNDER OF Matter Art & Science, a net- worked GROUP OF ARTISTS AND SCI- ENTISTS THAT EXPLORES NEW CON- VERGENCES OF DESIGN AND ENGI- NEERING. He was visiting artist at the MIT Media Lab in 2006.

engaged in undermining civil liberties by arresting people before they have committed a crime. They have appropriated corporate systems so that they can use consumer tracking. Tom Cruise must go down into the inner city, where there is no intelligent marketing, in order to escape that net.

As part of the early research for Minority Report, we vis- ited the scientists at the MIT Media Lab. There I met John Underkoffler, who soon after worked with our art depart- ment to help develop a gesture interface language in the spir- it of our attempt to achieve scientific and cultural accuracy in portraying the future. This was something Underkoffler had already been developing at the Media Lab, and he was able to convince Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg to accept the gesture system. He then continued to work alongside the

designers to create the future science for many of the film's set pieces, from the scrubbing of the precog brains to the

transportation systems. Minority Report ended up as a model of the potential

crosspollination between pop culture and reality. Not only did we feed the film with science, but the film also sparked enough interest in the idea of gesture recognition that John Underkoffler was motivated to develop the gesture system in

reality, where it now performs daily in his Oblong Industries lab in downtown Los Angeles.

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COLORPLATE $. ALEX MCDOWELL, ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES FOR BEE MOVIE , 2007. COURTESY DREAMWORKS.

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