welcome um to the last verlage keynotes of not only the semester but the academic year it's a pleasure to end um with studio folder giving the lecture entitled the agency of visual research so this uh lecture is part of our series a thursday evening series where we invite designers and thinkers at the forefront of innovative practice um let's say i'm quite excited for this lecture because it is not the typical architectural practitioner but studio folder has and has in the past and in the future will continue to collaborate a lot with architects and spatial designers so i think there's a kind of interesting body of work to contribute to our series here a studio folder is based in milan it was founded by marco ferrari and elsa pascal am i saying these things right and they work in a kind of well multi-disciplinary way from let's say forms of visual communication and branding to uh cartography and um modeling 3d realities um you also teach at the design academy in endoven and i believe you are now head of one of these departments but i'm not sure exactly what the name what what the what what what what what the name of this you know yeah information design um you know even more ambiguous than uh delved in the bare luck at any rate it's a pleasure to have uh marco here to uh present on behalf of the studio we look forward to your lecture uh and thank you for being here in a hot room on the hottest day on record in the netherlands this year now i'm dramatizing this but anyways the orange room is yours thank you so much that's really quite surprising the weather and coming from rome this morning where i was installing an exhibition that i would also show uh at the end of this talk and uh so basically it was very similar weather so it was a bit disconcerting when i came here uh but thank you so much for the invitation and thank you everyone for being here um so studio folder is a it's a small designer research agency we're currently seven designers a mix of designers architects and developers obesity milano we started around 10 years ago now i'm in archetype education at least my partner is graphic designer the inspiration from this talk came from this title the solomon suggested which plays going to rephrase the subtitle we used to define our studio so agency for visual research and i found very interesting because i never actually thought that by only changing an article and a preposition in this sentence this could shift from a definition or an attempt to make sense of a kind of hybrid approach with the design and research into a title the grounds visual research with a sort of like agenda or political milling with with agency uh so i think with this talk and try to kind of articulate on this question these assumptions and try to explain the work of the studio through this so usually in like in most of our lectures about one or two projects and we go like really in depth well this time i try to do the opposite uh so we will give you like an overview obviously on a risk in a series of recent projects of the studio where we try you know to explore and the agency of visual design through the different media we work with so as an agency we do a lot of commission projects in different fields so for example with the books in many of these books for example this one was designed for atelier luma a design laboratory in the south of france we produce visualizations and mostly maps that we edit research and design ourselves sometimes we design interfaces and softwares in this case we work were commissioned by the swiss company pumped to design the interface uh so all the different screens for the minimalistic phone jasper morrison designed the hardware the actual device while we took care when developed the whole user experience and interface the main characteristics of this phone is that it doesn't have any of the features that you have in your smartphone it's just like the basic kind of communication functions of like sending an sms and taking a call basically so the interface really pushed this forward by removing any color any visual any icon and just using text typography to find the sort of balance of information with the tiny screen of the phone with design exhibitions [Music] this is an image from an exhibition in internally building in milano for anas which is the main italian it's an italian company in charge for the maintenance and constructions of the road network and this exhibition was about the history and archive and for them we designed a kind of flexible system of tables uh that has like a grid and an assembly mechanism to um that could let the curators to put together a different assembly of photographs maps like boxes even micro projectors in order to organize the contents of the archive in a very flexible ways and this also was thought as a kind of permanent exhibition system for the trinale it didn't it didn't work this way unfortunately but was an interesting experiment to to play with modules and and different media and exposing them the idea of the table is sort of like metaphor for stenography or kind of like sonography device that we use a lot um and i think we see recurring as also in other projects we design a lot of maps in this case with a particular interest and it was designed for an exhibition at cca montreal an exhibition curated by jealous about the influence the mutual influences between russian and soviet architects and american architects over the course of 300 years mostly so we designed this quite big map like three meters by two that shows all the different trips uh and trajectories of uh you know the explorations and and trips of engineers artists and architects that were present in the exhibition the interesting thing of this project that we didn't just design the map itself but we actually had to kind of do historical research together with the curators in order to find exactly these reconstruct and rebuild the trajectories in the places that each of these historical figures visited so our work is all most of the time also has this kind of research and creator aspect a similar project in in the in the um let's say methodology and workflow it was this one even if completely different subject this was a commission for the vna in london uh for an exhibition about cars and the way in which cars have changed our lives cities and environments and we were asked to put together a film uh that showed evolution of european networks of highways so the ways in which it sprawled and grew over over the course of like a century and this seems like quite an easy task uh but somehow there's no like such a data set it doesn't really exist because like every country has its own data set so our work was mostly 90 tried to put together this data from a lot of different resources like books and newspapers uh articles and wikipedia entries openstreetmap and so on not very visible on this screen but we designed this also as a website so that the museum could also make it accessible online for the people that can actually not see the exhibitions and then with also websites [Music] this particular website you're going to see in a moment is a part of a particular project that didn't actually start in the studio but here in this place which is like 2500 meters in the dollar above sea level in the dolomites where we went to test one day in winter one of thomas saraceno flying sculptures uh part of the project the area scene uh in which kind of like it creates these uh basically odd hair balloons kind of uh tetrahedric sculptures that just raise and lift and fly through the heat of the sun that kind of hits the warm the air trapped inside the envelope so besides flying this balloon we also attach a gps sensor to it so we could actually trace the trajectories of the fly the movement of the sculpture during this was it tether flight the balloon was actually why does we just know go much higher in the atmosphere in the stratosphere and then after that we started actually to work on the actual website and the website our brief was to create an interactive visualizations in which we were using real-time wind data from mit and create like an interface in which people could actually virtually so um and then the simulation of the trajectories of these balloons around the globe was actually based on real-time data so the actual winds a different level of the atmosphere that we were retrieving from from different prediction models and climate models from mit so at the same time this project was the interactive website a tool for exploring how the atmosphere works and how wind pattern kind of unfolds around the globe to artists and his team to create like an immersive interactive experience in the exhibition so basically turn into a kind of like theater it's kind of interactive theater in the exhibition space so besides our commission work as a student we also engage in research projects what we call research project and i used them research always with a disclaimer it's not like academic research but it's kind of like design results and this research project are mostly focused on the representations of spatial data and the understanding and inquiry of the tools that are involved in the process of the creations of this data the manipulation the distribution the visualization so we see that our research practice develops or has developed an unorthodox approach to some theoretical issues around visualizations and in particular cartographic representation but when we talk about cartography we're not particularly interesting maps as design objects but more in i think more interesting is rooted into the understanding of how geographical information is used as a vector or a scaffold of data in the ways in which it can be can generate what i can call like graphical objects so somehow um elements that are like from being just visual elements they can also be part of a theoretically cultural discourse so what this history of this data are what are the contexts in which they're produced and how uh and why they emerge across different moments in history uh in order to give you an example of this kind of like process and context and also sort of a symbolic image of this kind of interest i wanted to pick this image these very famous visualizations of isotherm lines isotherms of like temperature uh equal lines uh distributed across the globe and it was made by alexander phenumbalt in the mid 19th century which we can consider as a one of the first attempts to map the global climate you see it is just the projection of the globe that kind of market the projection or a rectangular projection in which this kind of like curves represent the variation in temperature across different longitudes so the simple gestures are tracing lines of equal temperatures across the globe humboldt creates the illusion of a continuous measurement this visualization implies a series of imaginary stations so well and so densely distributed across the globe and so far the greatest possible precisions of measurement the calculation is representing a surface now temperature changes as a continuum so this is visualization of the surface but in order to produce this surface now the scientists at the time they didn't have this data which is an assumption based on various cars data so the power of this image comes from the fact that it completely hides the construction process so the sources of this inference so we see the results of the of humboldt's calculation the lines but we can't see the measuring stations so this map besides being the first representation of the global climate also marks the beginning what we can consider the cartographic representation of the climate but also like sparking sort of a trendy representation of our mental phenomena phenomena through isolines which actually convey besides precision representation the somehow the utopia of control there's some utopia that somehow everything is known and everything is calculable um [Music] just to kind of um wrap this part i would like to quote michelle letterbach in his studying of science science was dedicated much of his academic career to the study of humboldt and his work it says isometric lines were a product of averaging and interpolation connecting well observed points literally by drawing lines between them on a map that a continuous lines connecting mean values on the earth's surface could be drawn was as little obvious as the very existence of mean value join those lines constituted an act of faith in the emergence of global order out of local averages lines themselves which record the local physical quantities rather than mathematical expressions of them were the principal principle manifestations of nature's order so this is like an abstraction some mathematical abstractions that somehow remove the territory behind it and create a mesh of measurements around the globe um that is get represented through these lines the projections and instead of coordinates so i can request how can we question these assumptions and i think through like the project i'm gonna talk about today is um they're all attempts to understand and interrogate the ways in which measurements and data are constructed and we do that by constructing and designing different kind of objects in the imaginary stations of humboldt objects that somehow can let us see the war in different way departing from the managerial technologically determined modernist trajectory so by designing for example tools and sensors like the ones you see here or installations which is somehow is the main output of our design research work we try to investigate this history and agency of data in order to build different narratives and experiment with different forms of sonographic reenactment so we start by looking at three foundational projects of the studio so three main projects like an older project this seminar we were really helpful to establishing a methodology of methodology of work and also kind of an aesthetic language that then we developed more and more in different other projects in all of these three first projects i'm going to show they use data and specifically cartographic data and they translate them into different media combining archival research collaboration with different experts and scientists and historians manufacturing of hardware and installations filmmaking exhibition making writing and also publishing after this three i'm gonna talk about like three more recent ones just kind of ongoing on incomplete um this first three projects i see like a bit older so i'll try to be brief and highlight only the role in the development of our practice um the first one i'm going to talk about is italian limes which is a project maybe our maybe longest project so far which started as a contribution to the fourth thing architecture being now in venice in 2014 and ended a few years ago three years ago with the publication of a volume about the whole research and it's a project that question the idea of natural border by looking at the alpine border so the ones the territorial national boundary that separates italy from other european countries so kind of interrogates the relationship between the political border in a natural border as in intended as a kind of a feature of the landscape or something that exists as a geographical element that can be observed and recognized so the work started with a lot of like visits to the archive of the igm which is the acronym for instituto geographic military in english is a military geographic institute which is in many countries in the world is like the kind of military affiliated agency that responsible for the official cartography of a nation state and there we started to dive into the archives and then digitizing for publishing a lot of like different kind of documents diaries photographs journals drawings in order to reconstruct the history of the border as a special territorial and also architectural device so they were the ways in which the actual border was determined so surveyed measured etched on maps and also repo reproduce on the territory itself on the land itself in order to be able to be recognized and we did that by by basically looking from the initial history of italy as a kind of unified state so from the 1860s to nowadays so 150 years how the documents that somehow collected all this information and represented this history of this evolution of the day of the border they represented the landscape so we can see one of the most interesting i think operations that we can see from these documents is that the border was first of all a line that the surveyors were seeing by translating recognizable landscape features for example edges or glaciers or like peaks into p dimensional representations of of like different slopes for example something that the eye could catch of course there was a lot of like mathematical you know geodesic trigonometry trigonometric survey in order to somehow ground these measurements into again a measure calculation but then mostly again this kind of a really almost education of the surveyor in to see into the landscape sort of like a boundary so into recognizing some particularly prominent features of the landscape that could serve into this project of no determine the political boundary of the country [Music] and at some point one of the at the end say if this history of the border or the idea of the border told through um documents uh one of the last chapters that we found then became not a focus of our project was a particular kind of glitch in this idea of exact measurements which was called by climate change and they fight like in many areas of the across the alps where most of these high altitude borders that coincides with the watershed line between italy and other countries run some glaciers these glaciers are as you all know kind of melting very fast and so this kind of like changing the topography at high altitudes completely displaced the watershed and therefore displaced the political boundary of the country as well so basically push the cartographer to come up with different definitions of the border that someone could take into account uh you know the variations in the ecology of this landscape and a kind of like much faster change in the in the individual and material aspects of these of these zones so our project after being you know incubating the archive actually moved to one of these sites to one of these glaciers uh in which uh somehow having to do an installation we wanted to bring the glaciers into the exhibition space so maybe try to explore this idea of a fast-moving boundary of a fast-moving glacier in the exhibition space and we did that that by trying to push in the most radical ways possible this idea of like continuous measurements and kind of productions of live data so that through a series of no handmade custom technology the glacier that was constantly moving could somehow visualize itself in the exhibition space and generate itself some data that would represent the border so we basically designed and built these sensors which um the role of them the kind of the their function was to survive on a glacier for a few months uh so they were solar powered and then they they were basically installed one of these cross-border glaciers by organizing expeditions with scientists and journalists and other people that were somewhat documenting the work and installing them as a grid as a kind of like low-resolution grid each of these points was a sensor each of these sensors able just to determine uh its position in three-dimensional space so x y z and therefore this mesh became a three-dimensional mesh um each of these sensors also was programmed to broadcast its coding values every hour to a server by basically an sms these are all images of the installation of the sensors and these coordinates were then broadcasted to a drawing machine in the exhibition space and this drawing machine was just calculating the coordinates and just draw a line of the border based on the real-time reconfiguration of the surface of the glacier um and this is a project that somehow i i told like briefly but we did for several years and uh it took like a lot of hikes on the glaciers to check on the sensors we do the sensors make them a few times and then they worked [Music] the second project is a project we developed for the oslo architecture trinally in 2016 it's a project it's a similar kind of project but a completely different scale in this case it was about satellites also the italian elements summit is approachable satellites but satellites they produce kind of non-visual outputs or gps coordinates here is about satellites of remote sensing and in particular the landsat program you might be familiar with landsat landsat is the longest running satellite program that ever existed so it's a program started by nasa it basically gave us a continuous portrait of the planet from 1972 to nowadays so the kind of continuous production of images uh so thanks to landsat now we can basically go back in time and animate all this kind of change of different ecosystems and different landscapes landsat is a medium resolution satellite so it's not meant to kind of like observe things in high detail but actually to see you know environments and therefore being such a long program is also considered the biggest image archive in the world so this is a visit that we did in sioux falls in south dakota where the headquarters are and we entered this like huge archive again like it's considered the biggest archive in the war in terms of number images produced what we did with this project we wanted to visualize these archives somehow visualize the eye of the satellite so understanding over the course of these almost 50 years how this image of the world the satellite reproduction of the of the world usually we experience through our phones it seems like a very smooth single image like very very equal no all across the globe there's no difference when you when you when you scroll through google earth everything looks crisp and nice and continuous and higher solution so this was built over the over the course of 50 years all of this all the landsat data are free for downloads are open source of course there's a huge amount of data and we started by looking at this data but not looking at the images but the metadata of the images so we only downloaded a tiny fraction of information so each data point each image of landsat we only took the location where it was taken and the date and then we built this image which is basically just a heat map of all the pictures like millions of pictures the landsat took over the course of 50 years and immediately something really interesting emerged the fact that like this hitmap is actually not uh the same all over the globe now that you have like artists that are darker so it means like landsat took many more images there and areas that are less dark and obviously the united states is darker because it's a non-american program but then you can see you can start to see if you look at the fine grain of the images other areas that are also darker for example afghanistan and pakistan ukraine russia china and then of course australia because probably the american government is still a government there's an agreement to the use of images so small by considering these images were taken in between like the 70s 1890s and 2000s about those areas also the ones were interesting and very important you know geopolitical things happen and being landsat supposedly only an environmental monitoring project we wanted to explore some of these not these connections and then we with the same data we did like the second step was to just like decompose them so creating instead of looking at them all together we just unpacked them and like ear by er showing understanding where landsat was looking and you see this animation shows data that at the beginning are very sparse and then become more and more consistent because of course landsat improved the technology so the data from not the 2010s are very very no very very complete but the more you go back in time so the more technology is less developed then you can see the priorities the agenda of the agency that run landsat so actually where year by year depending on what was happening in the world was looking so once we realized this we didn't want to do any kind of like you know cause consequence assumptions because all these systems all these technologies are like incredibly complex and with a lot of different agendas also we just wanted to visualize this form of like atlas in in the way that somehow the the visitors of the exhibition could conceive these these structures and could see these kind of fragmentations so we dimensional atlas so by creating like globes and then hacking a drawing machine um into to etch these uh this data into uh spheres and then creating like portraits year by year of lanza data so this way was a way of representing in a sort of like comparative atlas all of these data that otherwise are lost this information is completely lost in the final product in the output of you know out of the very refined pipeline of you know data that nasa produces this kind of process is completely hidden uh and then we did also other visualizations about the fragmentations of uh the compositions of the mosaic of saturated data into google earth through this kind of speculative models and the third project um this kind of like foundational project is a project that we developed for the ljubljana biennial in 2017 in which this was a bit different because we didn't do it as a studio but we did do as kind of more curators of a group of like practitioners designers architects in which we were asked by the curators of the whole biennial to look at one valley very close to the border between slovenia and italy the valley of caporetto covering if any of you know some of the history of the or the first world war uh because it was a especially italian history is a very important area because was the an area where one of the most cruel and most tragic battles of the first world war were fought with like enormous loss of life in a creating not in a mountainous environment so became a kind of an italian language copyright corporate is basically the epitome of like the defeat but some of this value is like incredibly charged historically now almost completely forgot this past i mean there's a mausoleum there's some monuments but then it's a is a valid developed tourism and kind of like sports almost extreme sports some other curator just asked to like inquire these conditions and understanding how no one landscape could uh shift from from like one history to to the present you know the somehow almost like doesn't burn any trace of that past and so what could be like a tension between a preservation of history preservation of nature and the destructions of nature as well and a different form of exploitation of nature so what we did was basically just find different stories and different props and different forms of representations of different threads of history in this landscape and arrange them in a sort of like theatrical setting so we just basically went to different places different archives talk to different people and we we collected objects sub-object we designed as well these objects were documents maps diagrams different forms of technologies they're articulated like three main narratives so the first one is about sound so we discovered that one of the role of one of the let's say things that came out from the three four years that the war was fought in these valleys and mountains was the developing development of a very sophisticated sound technology that before the advent of aerial survey and gps technology the different armies couldn't really see where the other artillery was located because it was very rock terrain so they were using sound to basically locate based on like you know how the sun was traveling across the mountains they could triangulate the problems of the sound and determine the location of where for example a project that was shot and this incredible these kind of like sound ranging technologies were developed by phd students and professors whatever they were hired by the army but instead of being put to kind of on the lines they were actually asked to develop these systems and the same people the same scientists and phd students that did this kind of research and came out with usable technologies to basically destroy enemy lines then were exactly the same people that founded the cnr which is the national research center of italy somebody kind of an interesting story that happened in this exact valley the roots this kind of legacy of you know the military legacy of research but somehow how no scientific research was connected to these these particular events these are images of documents that we found over several weeks in the archives in rome of the of the military um we also then part of this work was super like installing a microphone in the woods nearby to basically create sound for the installation and record kind of like in real time sound [Music] and then the second narrative was about the idea of like ecology one of the one of the professors was involved in the sound ranging the development center in range of technology was also one of the most active in the 20s to develop theories about population management in understanding how like through mathematical equations um different uh the life of different populations of animals within ecosystem could be managed and controlled and so the fact that this then this person kind of like developed these theories in this landscape brought us to the um like looking how these trajectories research were also used in the 70s to as a base for example the limits to growth this kind of like studies about understanding how human population could manage in order to avoid collapse and societal collapse and also connected to the work of some artists in the area that were actively in the 70s and 80s actually advocating for germany which is a completely different way of an ecology through kind of spiritual theories uh and the look of like rocks and soils in order to discover in hidden energies of the landscape so all these different threads were basically presented in a sort of like surface two-dimensional surface which we played with the distribution associations and depth and height in order to let them let the visitors uh kind of explore these different threads so in the sense somehow this this one for us was a bit of an unfinished project in the sense that the actual is very open configurations of the results there is no conclusions there is no there's not even like a linear narrative it was just just like positions of threats in which we try our best to give represent these different threats in order to provide you know entry points for the visitors to further think about this place and further think about these histories this was a very magical project so all of this result was a collaborative work of the 12 people we coordinated to do that so building on these three foundational projects here are three or more there are much more recent so some of them are still ongoing open and these three projects are in between commission research and they said that were commissioned to us by curators but we were not just we didn't just the designer's role but we also had the role of like doing research and curate and determine the output the first one is uh called was part of a exhibition called kiruna forever at arctis which is the center of architecture in stockholm [Music] you may be familiar with the with the um with the name of kiruna hirono is a city in um a town in northern animation here okay supposed to be a video it doesn't play um that's right uh in the city northern sweden that was founded in the late 19th century because an iron ore was found there in what is like submit territory so like very close to the active circle um mostly inhabited by sami so at the end of 19th century iron ore is found and this iron ore keeps being developed and the town that initially was hosting only the workers grows over decades and especially in the 50s and 60s becomes a quite important town because a lot of like famous modernist swedish architects kind of built different buildings and different like municipal buildings houses for works and so on so it becomes kind of an icon of nordic modernism what happens though is that this also the iron ore is keeps developing and being an uh and somehow becomes one of the main assets of the british economy it's still like one of the most important iron ore in the entire world and for the quality and the quantity of iron but but being a in an ore of course it doesn't develop according to plants so the geology of this ore is was unpredictable it was not done in the beginning so while the state company that was in charge of managing the ore continues to excavate this ore basically started to erode the city itself so the the the configuration of the geometry of the ore and its geology was basically going under the city and the city started to crumble up no above so at some point i think in the early 2000s [Music] the government was faced with the problem of what to do with the city if continuing to excavate or actually either close relocate the citizens or just close the iron ore and because it was such a huge asset they decided to relocate the city but not just completely removing destroying or abandoning the city but also trying to move the most valuable architecture because this is like just a context of the project this is not our footage it's just part of the of the exhibition i'm just using it to to explain what we're talking about so the focus of the exhibition was this uh so like like reconstructing of the history of this place and uh and all the different consequences and the contradictions of the territory of this landscape which of course is a history of occupation colonialism internal colonialism extractions and also not displacement of local population because the people that inhabited this lands and had their economy it was were maintaining this landscape in different ways from the destructive industries that then the swedish government put there uh didn't have these problems so what were asked was to take care of this object on the right which was a wooden model of the city built in the 60s by a craft man in hirono which was used for a few decades to as a sort of like table of conversation with from between the municipality and the citizens so this was kind of like a planning tool this model was just like used now to explain what was happening in the city different developments so that everyone could actually see what was going on so the curators brought this model from kiruna to to stockholm and they wanted to use an exhibition and asked us to use the model as a kind of like base for telling different stories about kiron's landscape so basically to augment the models with different kind of results these are some images so what we decided to do was to use projection mapping as a kind of like media so kind of augment the model through other visuals and also paired with this bot to this model video so the first thing we did was actually we had to reconstruct a model of this like a digital model a digital version of the physical model because being an actual material document there was no pre-existing 3d so through photogrammetry we rebuilt the model uh the top row is photographs and the bottom row are the 3d renders of the dream model we will build in order to do projection mapping as you may know you need exact as precise as possible this is a reconstruction that you use to know shape the projection and mark the projection and then we started to understand the scale of the city what we could actually visualize of course being a physical model we couldn't change the scale and the extent of this visualization so it's a very fixed constraint so there were some things that we could show at the scale the scale of the city basically and some other things that we couldn't so we used also we created another surface like a panel that we put like nearby the model to actually show different scales and provide a sort of like trans color experience so this was actually the model looks like in the exhibition it's not very visible here because a lot of light but um you see like a combination of text line textures and um and what you see on the bottom here is the other screen which now appears so this is kind of like relationship between uh the surface of the model and this actual video in which this kind of like is basically filming two channels continuously move in and out in order to explain different uh different topics so uh in the end we explore five different themes related to the history of kiruna and we call this kind of film india and the visual exploration in five acts and we use like different kind of visualization for cartography through actual footage that we pull from archives of the city to 3d modeling through diagrams and visualizations such as or like extra excerpts from from different videos and then the five acts so the five actors were organized in a linear way so we move from like the underground describing the mechanics and the geology of the mind so for example the visualizations of the mind where i was explaining before is now was part of this video so kind of the mineral scale the extent very very close to the ground understanding what's happening just describing to the visitors you know the kind of the history of the mind itself as a geological object the second act moved on the surface some described city planning and how particular architecture were chosen to be moved and others chosen to be sacrificed and so this actually shows in a very not precise didactic way the main architectures you know the fate of them and where are they located in the city the third acts uh move like an original scale so it's about the relationship of the city with a bigger landscape of the samuel population so the ways in which different ideas of use of lands landscape the boundaries the ways in which the territory was organized before the advent of the city so visualize different ways like migratory patterns of reindeer which is the main economy of the sunny people the ways in which to use like the landscape at a very large scale from north to south the fourth act was about global trade so relation with kiruna with global shipping and different economies of extraction of course the existence of kiruna is rooted to the existence of the iron ore so how the fate of the city is also determined by global markets and decisions about the possibility to ship this iron efficiently and economically to different markets the main market is china so one of the reasons why this british government decided to keep this mine open is because with the melting of the ice cups the polar ice caps it would be much easier to ship this order to china for the geographical positions of kiruna so we visualize that and and the fifth act was about uh uh the planetary the orbital uh landscape somehow kiruna is also since a couple decades a center of uh like space technologies being a remote town is also very suitable for shooting rockets into the space which of course is an ex you could say destructive economy as a use of landscape that plays on this idea of remoteness well it's not remote for people that used to live there for many centuries and so this this fifth act explore the relation between now the old history of kiruna wrote in the underground the possible future of kiruna when the iron ore will be depleted and the economy will be shifted to the sky so there was uh it was the um yeah the contribution to exhibition we never got to see this project because uh it was during covid so actually all this install was remote done remotely which is also like a bit of a challenge so unfortunately we never actually saw the project in the exhibition space second project which also we never got to see because it was exhibited in madrid in shanghai currently and we couldn't travel there because of kavit it's an ongoing project it's a more speculative project there was part of an exhibition in madrid about the legacy in the archival book mr fuller so very kind of deductive exhibitions about who fueler was and what it what did he do and it's or is legacy we were asked by the curators to uh to basically questions the legacy of fuller in terms of his contribution to cartography and information design very free very free brief and in particular sort of like critique the utopia now the modernist of topic of fuller that was obsessed with data was obsessed with maps as a tool of understanding how the world could be more just if this information for example the information of like what resources are is more transparent according to fuller if we know more then we can be like we can redistribute this resources more equally so it's like a lot of his work as you may know if you know a bit about his uh his work besides not designing objects designing like cars designing maps is also like a lot of writing a lot of talking in order to you know convince and push politicians to adopt these ideas and strategies and in particular we took as a starting point these 42 hours lectures that you can find also on youtube which is called everything i know we select talks forever for 42 hours and this became like the title of the project which we just shifted it everything we know and we took as a starting point three of his ideas the first one is the geoscope the geoscope was a sort of a idea of an installation uh that he managed to do physically but a more important thing is the kind of like his initial project was the idea of like constructing a globe in scale and putting this island in front of the u.n building in new york and this globe was actually meant to be an interactive installation so globally like a lot of lights like light bulbs they would like turn on and on depending on the different data that it was mapping so for example where is like uh what are the resources and and it will be like lights showing where these things are so using points of light to show the politicians discussing the un how to take to take better decisions how to be more informed inventors to do this uh he didn't he never convinced anyone to pay for this to be installed in new york but he managed to somehow test his hypothesis in different workshops and working with schools and universities so he builds some examples of these things um so that was one thing the second thing is the working breadboard which was a growing repository of information on how basically to light the bulbs of the geoscope so kind of a collections of a lot of uh it was that could be used either for the geoscope of the war game which was basically the war game was also like sort of a derivative project uh that he did a lot of students and different communities in which he would use like a huge map as a sort of like a theater for showing where things were where resources were in order for kind of like train people to take more aware geopolitical decisions so the war game the war game report and the geoscope and of course the dim action map were kind of like elements we wanted to play with and the last reflection was this form of visualizations these are slides from the archives of fuller which is in stanford in california which were kind of slightly were using it was was using in his lectures in which you can see kind of like flows and again uh positions of different resources the different data we don't don't even have to know what they are represented as dots you know kind of like a very simple abstract dot maps so these agencies of kind of abstractions in order to represent just the quantities and locations of things so we came up with a sort of uh idea of reenacting all of these so recreating this the possibility of playing with this data now that actually we have access to now much bigger access to information and data than fuller had fuller was imagining a world in the future in which satellites could be in the sky all the time it could basically project down to us information in real time now about these resources it was obsessed with now we have a lot of this we have like a lot of open source data we have tons of satellites so we actually live in a regime in which this information is accessible for everyone but of course no i wouldn't say that the world is like a better place because of this so we wanted somehow to create an experience in which now this would we are enacted so we started to do two things uh one collects a lot of data sets like very randomly so basically scrape the internet to find all possible global data sets available from many different sources satellite information things about the environment things about economy things about mineral deposits things about housing different categories and then we put together also scraping from online essays articles blog entries tweet tweets of like relevant thinkers from different geographies they were talking about these things this data we wanted to put these things together to kind of like create a sort of like conversation around this data then we created like a lot of uh it was a big effort in uh homogenizing this data because of course with the impression that not everything is available online all this information is like really digestible and usable but then we really wanted to translate everything into a very similar language to the one of who learned so to somehow reach the same level level of abstraction so we kind of like had to develop like software in order to be able to translate different forms of data into particles into the exact same visualizations so somehow every particle not depending on what it was representing was one quantity of something so but just one title and one unit of measurements we could basically depict everything and then we also had to uh develop a software to project everything from america to projection into a dymaxion projection which is a bit interesting because uh fuller was an advocate of knowledge sharing but the maximum projection is copyrighted by the fuller uh legacy institute uh so the actually mathematical equations of the full project the maximum projection the fuller projections are not easily accessible so kind of like hacker software to be able to transform those data into the fuller and then we actually started to create a database where we could visualize is that in motion so basically move from one outside to the other and just like see how things were distributed it's a very dataistic results and operation so there's not really correlation between any of these animations so each animation shows something like a subject these are just like testing things that we and it moves to another data sets in a very random way just random but somehow we kind of realized that the interesting effect of this visualization was not the static map so was not actually understanding where things were more dance where things were more concentrated but a random relationship between two possible data sets so you can relation relational value of information so understanding for example relation between you know flight patterns and migration patterns or are any other possible things that somehow this algorithm would show us so that was the cartographic part then we created an interface with all the sentences and the quotes we put from the internet which would allow the visitors to basically interact virtually with these authors and thinkers and scientists and experts of different fields but basically typing some sentences is a kind of like language recognizing algorithm that basically put together a conversation and then the two things were linked so by the through this kind of systems of cards and conversations the the visitors exhibition could actually interrogate this sort of oracle and get some data out of the map it's a very again it's very completely random there's no way of controlling the conversation the conversation is like a contribution between the visitors and the quotes and the data and it's just like it's kind of like mesmerizing theater of information and these are some images of the install unfortunately the very dark images because it's kind of dark room where you only see this kind of white dots so in this setting it's not very visible um but yeah you kind of get an idea so it's like converse screen with a conversation a huge dim action map it's like a 12 meters peak and just this tiny screen with the title and the source of the data this is an ongoing project it will be converted into website so since none of us was able to see this exhibition as well so we want to kind of experience it online at least and the third and last project is a project that is a much more let's say prozac project in this in a sense straightforward it's an exhibition design [Music] which we started to work a year ago commissioned by museum of photography milan in a minister of culture of italy so the ministry of culture for the past two years commission selected and commissioned 10 different young photographers to do a survey of italian post-war architecture it's just a very uh kind of uh almost like non-curated historical assessment of the status of italian architecture so these ten different photographers basically travel across the country they were divided different regions based on where they were experienced where they were living and they like through different 10 different itineraries they put together an archive of imagery more than like 3000 images these are just some quick maps that we did with all the different architectures that they documented uh so we're asked to do an exhibition design for the trinary milano so this atlas or italian architecture was done basically became that we turned an exhibition and a catalog so we're asked to do to do both uh so when we in order to come up with an idea for the exhibition design first we wanted to understand these itineraries so we plot them on a map and then we start no before it's just abstract diagrams we know we know not territory nothing else and just the points and the lines and this then we kind of like overlaid these trajectories onto the topography of italy and so now we realized immediately that the interesting part of the survey beside the actual architecture was the the representations of italian landscape and the the understanding of how not the territory itself and the context of architectures plays an incredible role in uh in in showing the architecture and hosting architecture and how the in this in these photographs in this work of these photographers there was just much more than just the building itself so we wanted someone to recreate the experience of this travel and recreate the experience of these uh this act of going through a landscape going through a territory so we took the decisions of almost quite nicely to okay what about recreating this exhibit this you know tiny thinners as a model as a map in the space it's a three-dimensional map so some of the map becomes at the same time the exhibition design but also sort of like interior architecture of the space where the exhibition was taking place so we we use like a digital evaluation elevation model of italy we kind of divide it into a very coarse grid corresponding to basically the size of the space that we're about we were available and then these colors is basically each of these squares each of this grid takes just a mean value of altitude of the area it's sits on and then we built a model uh of this which also this being a traveling exhibition because some other idea was like from milan it would travel elsewhere wanted to be cheap and like easily uh movable so the idea of using for this system you can industrial industries you know kind of like um industrial floor that i use for like in airports for example commercial modes kind of like floating floor systems so we conducted a company uh they produced this industrially uh and realized that they are very cheap to produce so basically they gave us they basically rented us so the exhibition became immediately incredibly cheap and also very very easy to dismantle and remount because once these are dismounted it's kind of like systems of like minecraft the landscape it parks like in a very very small volume and then they after creating this landscape with this just no the exhibit the exhibition design was just find a way of placing all these photographs somewhere nearby the place where they belonged so cartographically position them in the in the in the in the in the geography these are renders the first renders and the idea was then once we had this kind of topography just to keep the rest of the exhibition as slim as possible as invisible as possible this is a configuration of the space uh in the room of the trinale in the trainer we also did a ramp for allowing people to go on the back and see from above that is that the exhibition is completely accessible so you can walk everywhere so it's like at the same time like a sitting space it's like a stair there's a platform forward to see other things so it completely destroys the idea of a photography exhibition a special architecture photograph of exhibition in which things are like lay down on the wall isolated in white space it's a very mesh exhibition and everything is kind of overlaid with a lot of different things but smite's very interactive exhibitions because the visitors have to kind of walk around walk across and upon to to discover the images and then this was the entrance it's an exhibition is it is the exhibition room there is like uh three three walls kind of like uh blind with no windows and then one big glass entrance we put this scale because the idea is that the whole once you enter the room the whole room becomes a cartographic space it's a whole volume it basically is reduced to the scale of the country and then these are the images of course these panels were not just blank they were printed so we envisioned kind of like a ways in js software to basically we design a map where all these scenarios were were represented and then we divided by 400 tiles and printed them out so actually you could see then you can see the terrain you can see the 33 and then it's just like completely assembled with screws so you have like the system of the this kind of like uh supporting systems the same screw also keeps the the frame of the of the photograph um and then so there are 10 different orders there is no distinction between others so you kind of know which one you're seeing but it's more like a car collective work really wanted to push someone beyond the idea of the author the photographer it's more about idea of like collective survey it's very blended each photographers was still allowed to kind of build their own somehow mosaic images so there was a negotiation between now the overall exhibition design their composition work but the interesting thing is that you stack position so everywhere you move if you move one meter the landscape completely changes so you see one image always superimposed with other ones there is never a way in which you can see one image without other ones which somehow was kind of like a metaphor of like a an understanding of architecture in its context there's no way in which you can see you know architecture as isolated object is always within something else then it was like a system of like captions to be able to kind of make sense of this these are some images we took flying over the installation and then i was in rome this morning because the exhibition was moved to rome so exactly now as we speak is opening in rome in a completely different setting in outside so in the courtyard of palazzo altems which is a like a renaissance building in the center of rome for which we the culture is roughly the same is a bit bigger than the romans renale so we we had to kind of read up a bit uh and then we assemble these are images uh with iphone over the past few days in which the exhibition was completely mounted there uh being outdoor the panels were fine because it's metal but um the images were reprinted on aluminum and then was assembled in the in the space um it's very different space of course uh the amazing thing is that from this kind of first level logic you kind of see from above which actually complete change in perspective so the whole culture becomes a sort of like again cartographic space but also almost like aerial survey of the exhibition itself and yeah this is opening just now hopefully we'll travel also elsewhere in the near future [Applause] thank you very much we have a few minutes for questions before we need to close up i don't know how to do it anymore now uh thank you very much for your very interesting lecture um i was interested in your experience with exhibitions and i wanted to ask you uh in your opinion did have you find any more successful way to represent uh yeah or to do an exhibition i don't know do it it printed digital using new technologies what do you think is uh yeah a good way to do it well i'm not sure there's an answer to this uh i think it really depends on of course the subject um and uh also you know all exhibitions design come out of a conversation with the curators and the authors or the archives all the other experts that are involved in making it so i think we never start with a preconception or a kind of like style or a particular set of like formal elements we want to adopt to materials or so it's always about developing ideas in conversation with all the different people involved so i would say there's no best way of doing even like designing this process is a very open process i think it's mostly kind of engaging with the materials is understanding what what context they belong to what you can extract from them in terms of information in terms of aesthetics in terms of their histories and then it's the dialogue with the curators thank you hello thank you for your lecture i am fabiola from peru and i was very interested in the humboldt um cartography that you showed us and it reminded me of a cross-section that he did of the andes in south america the jim bodaso volcano i think um in which he was like a pioneer in representing in cartography the relationship between like those aspects of the earth like altitude temperature so um what do you think about that translation of that he made into into cartography and also my second question would be like um it's also these different aspects that you um show us in your experience like exhibitions how did the studio um came up with with the idea of taking this path of maybe um not this normal architecture path like building but doing exhibitions and what you guys do yeah thank you for the question absolutely i mean the the the work of humboldt is incredibly interesting and um relevant also because i think it's always been praised and acclaimed for being like you know the first global scientist and they want to set really the foundations of a lot of uh you know planetary thinking that we're used to nowadays but also it's a very problematic legacy and i think that yeah what in what's interesting in those representations in particular also when it creates this kind of like very you know inspiring illustrations of like the you know different mountain ranges the mount shimborazo this seems like very natural landscapes but a complete again they're mathematical abstractions so it extracts elements from the landscape but turn them into indexes indexes of flora indexes of snow now all everything is turned into numbers and lines so i think like they're very incredibly relevant to read as the very first examples of this understanding of ecology and landscape through uh abstractions and control and measurement uh and it does that is of course like with the language and then with aesthetics and the visualization towards the other time but i see like a very very straight trajectory from that point in time to where we know to the tools and the data we have nowadays um then the second question was about oh yeah why exhibitions well i always been interested in the role of architecture to now frame more broadly our relation with space and [Music] i think for me most architecture is doing drawings mostly interesting about uh in that part and so the role of visualizations to kind of like shape our vision of the world understanding of the world and different phenomena and that's an incredible power in there so i'm always much more interested in that than just dedicating on the other hand effort and time to to build physically materially i think images build a war in the same way in very more powerful way and just two different ways of engaging with it thank you very much i'm sorry we have a few other questions but we need to end um because of some other logistical issues so the wonderful one will ask her question at the dinner table in a little while uh thank you for everybody uh that is uh joining here thank you for a great lecture i will also ask my question related to you being trained as an architect and how you visualize uh such things in another way than a graphic designer but that will be at dinner too thank you round of applause thank you for a full academic year bye