ইরানে হামলার আগে যুক্তরাষ্ট্রকে জানাবে না ইসরায়েল - প্রথম আলো
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26/02/2012
Obama in 2008: Isn't This $3.50/Gallon Gas Intolerable?
Obama in 2008: Isn't This $3.50/Gallon Gas Intolerable?:
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
Buzzfeed reminds us that back in 2008, then-Senator Obama ran ads lamenting that Americans were paying $3.50 per gallon:
Keep reading this post . . .
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MicroVisions 7 Contributors Announced
MicroVisions 7 Contributors Announced: 
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
MicroVisions 7 has begun and it’s a stellar line-up.
For those new to the event, each year Greg Manchess, Dan Dos Santos, and I ask a dozen artists to create a 5x7 painting of their choosing. These miniatures are exhibited at the Society of Illustrators and then placed on auction with all proceeds going to the Society’s student scholarship fund.
This year’s contributors are:
The exhibit will run in May, with the auction taking place late in the month. Details will be posted as the event draws near.
The Society Scholarships are among the illustrations industry’s toughest awards. This year, over 8,000 entries weher examined by 25 judges. Just over 200 students will be accepted into the exhibit, and about half will earn cash awards. Not only do these awards help subsidize students financially, they also go a long way to boost the confidence of young artists (and their nervous parents) by proving their voices stand out amongst thousands of others. It’s never long before you start seeing the winners on their way to becoming the field’s biggest names. John Jude Palencar, James Jean, Tomer Hanuka, Dan Dos Santos and hundreds of others have become noted illustrators since the Scholarship’s inception in 1981.
Once again, I would like to thank the artists involved for heir generosity. The illustration community is incredibly supportive. Not every profession would donate time and energy into supporting their future competition.
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
Japanese Company To Build Space Elevator?
Japanese Company To Build Space Elevator?: Establish an elevator system linking Earth to space! (SF in the News)
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
Review of mad as nuts PORTRAIT OF A ZOMBIE
Review of mad as nuts PORTRAIT OF A ZOMBIE: 
Bing Bailey's Dublin set mock-zom-doc is something of an oddity. Try to imagine a zombie movie in which basically everyone is okay with the fact that there are zombies around every corner, lurking in bedrooms and hallways in housing estates; just another problem alongside unemployment, failing marriages and the price of tea. People go to work, visit relatives and carry on as if the zombie epidemic was just another one of life's burdens, a bit like accepting that we're in the middle of a global financial meltdown that has nothing to do with us, but for which we're paying the price. And yet it's played largely straight and not for laughs. I think the word that comes to mind while watching these characters is simply: Madness. Everyone in this films is insane; zombies, people and film crews, all in it together.
Continue reading
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
Bing Bailey's Dublin set mock-zom-doc is something of an oddity. Try to imagine a zombie movie in which basically everyone is okay with the fact that there are zombies around every corner, lurking in bedrooms and hallways in housing estates; just another problem alongside unemployment, failing marriages and the price of tea. People go to work, visit relatives and carry on as if the zombie epidemic was just another one of life's burdens, a bit like accepting that we're in the middle of a global financial meltdown that has nothing to do with us, but for which we're paying the price. And yet it's played largely straight and not for laughs. I think the word that comes to mind while watching these characters is simply: Madness. Everyone in this films is insane; zombies, people and film crews, all in it together.Continue reading
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
English trailer for DOOMSDAY BOOK
English trailer for DOOMSDAY BOOK: 
An English trailer has finally arrived the fascinating looking Korean apocalypse anthology, Doomsday Book. The film comes from Kim Jee-Woon (I Saw the Devil) and Yim Pil-Sung (Hansel & Gretel) and it looks pretty darn interesting.
Continue reading
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
An English trailer has finally arrived the fascinating looking Korean apocalypse anthology, Doomsday Book. The film comes from Kim Jee-Woon (I Saw the Devil) and Yim Pil-Sung (Hansel & Gretel) and it looks pretty darn interesting.Continue reading
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
Liberation Terroir: The Great Escape (1963)
Liberation Terroir: The Great Escape (1963): 
[Image: Stalag Luft III from The Great Escape; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC—continued recently with The Great Escape (1963), directed by John Sturges.
For those of you new to the fest, from January to April 2012 we will be watching a curated series of films at home, then discussing those films online; here is the complete schedule.
[Image: A guard tower from The Great Escape; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
As usual, I'll be focusing on the spatial premise of the film, not its directing, characterization, or dialogue; the idea is not to experiment in film criticism but to explore various scenarios of escape.
Also, as usual: there are spoilers ahead!
[Images: Establishing the camp; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
The film opens with the arrival of several truckloads of Allied war prisoners at a well-fortified German camp in the forests of western Poland. The lighthearted and substantially less than serious tone of the film is immediately made clear, however, not only through the jaunty title score but in the actions of the prisoners themselves as they spill out into their new environment.
Right away, escape is on their minds; we see them kneeling down to look for weaknesses beneath the boarding houses, scanning the barbed perimeter fence, and discussing the logistics of tunneling out into the woods beyond. In fact, several half-baked attempts at escape are made in the first few minutes of the film.
[Images: Looking for weaknesses; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
The prisoners disguise themselves as rural day workers, for instance, hoping to sneak out through the front gate, yard tools in hand—but they are spotted right away and sent back. Then several men camouflage themselves beneath forest debris, riding out on trucks under piles of pine branches—before the stabs of a menacing pitchfork convince them to pop out from this botanical ruse and surrender.
[Image: Humans disguised as trees; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
In short order, we learn that the camp was specifically built for these men. It takes its shape, we might say, in response to their past actions.
Flipping through the files of his newly arrived prisoners, and speaking with obvious exasperation as he reads their dossiers of escape—"escaped, recaptured, escaped, recaptured," Luftwaffe Colonel von Luger sighs, throwing files across his desk—the superintendent explains that the camp is, in fact, inescapable.
"There will be no escapes from this camp," he says flatly—to which the British Captain Ramsey replies that "it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they can't, it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability."
Escape is part of the soldiers' contract; it is something they are literally required to try to do.
[Images: Reading the files of failed escapes; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
But "it must stop," the Nazi insists—however, "it is because we expect the opposite that we have brought you here. This is a new camp. It has been built to hold you and your men. It is organized to incorporate all we have learned of security measures. And, in me, you will not be dealing with the common jailer."
Here, it's worth recalling that the film is based on a true story, and that the actual camp—called Stalag Luft III—was located for very specific topographical reasons, as if applying the concept of terroir to prison construction. More specifically, the sandy soil upon which the camp was built was seen as all but impossible to tunnel through.
Last month, on his fantastic blog Through the Sandglass, geologist Michael Welland discussed the film's geology of escape: "The prisoner of war camp was built, intentionally, on the sandy soils of the forests of today’s western Poland, along the banks of the Bóbr river. Intentionally, because the river valley is filled with sandy sediments deposited from melt waters of the Ice Age glaciers and carried by the ancestral Bóbr. And sand is difficult to tunnel through. Very difficult." Additionally—and much more visibly—"the excavated sand from the tunnels was immediately visible if deposited against the darker topsoil" outside, which leads to one of the escapees' more interesting innovations.
[Images: The relaxing technique of soiling a garden down your pant legs; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
One of the British POWs fabricates a kind of illicit earth-moving garment meant to be worn inside the prisoners' trousers; filled with dark soil from the tunnels soon underway beneath the boarding houses, these string-operated bags can be dumped surreptitiously into the gardens outside. This is reminiscent, of course, of the garden scene in Grand Illusion, which we watched last month, but it also allows for the oddly comic sight of prisoner after prisoner walking out into the garden, only to evacuate this terrestrial excess down their pant legs, literally soiling the sandy ground.
But this is not the only method the prisoners use for getting rid of surplus soil. In a surreal scene inside the camp's erstwhile cafeteria and study hall, exaggerated shudders begin to pass through the roof of the building, lurching and convulsing as if in an earthquake—which, in a sense, is exactly what's happening, as we learn that the diggers have begun storing their dirt above the rafters in the attic of the hall. Alas, the unbelievable rolling seismicity of this scene is the last we see or hear of this comically artificial tectonic activity.
[Image: James Garner looks up with alarm as artificial earthquake waves shudder through the roof; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Which brings us to the buildings.
As in A Man Escaped, we see that, by dismantling the everyday environment in which we are trapped, we might reveal hidden tools of escape—and then to assemble ways out. In this case, the boarding houses are taken apart from within, their wooden planks strategically removed so as not to induce structural collapse (save for one scene involving an over-enthusiastic campmate collapsing through his newly weakened bed frame).
In the architectural equivalent of cutting hair with thinning scissors, the buildings are lightened of their wood, which is then taken below ground and assembled into bracing for the tunnels.
[Images: Steve McQueen as erstwhile Matta-Clark of the camp; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
As all this unfolds, the tunnels expand below.
In a well-composed shot, we see Charles Bronson—who has been unspooling string from one end of the tunnel to the other—join two fellow diggers to form a kind of string trigonometry at the tunnel head. Using a plumb bob and pencil, they—incorrectly, as we learn later—determine the tunnel's length.
[Images: Measuring the tunnel; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
But it's all for naught. The tunnel (one of three simultaneous excavations) is soon discovered. One of the Nazi guards inadvertently reveals it when he spills tea onto the floor of a boarding house kitchen; the water rapidly drains down through the tiles without trace, indicating some sort of void below. And into the void go the Nazis.
[Images: Discovering the tunnel with tea; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
In any case, I could recount the events of the film ad nauseam, as its procedural tracking of the tunneling process—which, luckily for the prisoners, included two other escape routes from which to choose next—lends itself well to description. But I'll instead just make a few final points, and then recommend that you check out the movie yourselves:
At one point early in the film, Steve McQueen's baseball-tossing character, Captain Virgil Hilts, proposes an absolutely idiotic method of escape, in which he and a fellow inmate will literally burrow through the earth "like moles," passing the dirt behind them, one at a time, as if swimming breaststroke through the solid matter of the planet. After detailing his ridiculous idea, McQueen self-confidently juts his head forward, making a kind of monkey face, as his future collaborator tries not to laugh beside him.
[Image: Steve McQueen wants to burrow through the earth like a mole; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Unsurprisingly, however, the plan doesn't work.
[Image: Steve McQueen's mole fantasy remains tragically unfulfilled; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Captain Hilts and his Scottish sidekick are almost immediately recaptured and sent to "the cooler," a building filled with unfurnished concrete cells (perhaps foreshadowing McQueen's role in Papillon a decade later).
But fear not! Oh, ye McQueenites. Captain Hilts later finds his odd terrestrial fantasy indirectly fulfilled when he has an opportunity to pop his head up out of a hole in the earth—like a mole!—and look back at the camp from which he is about to escape. He is beyond the camp's perimeter, though there is still a long way to go.
[Images: Steve McQueen as topography: the actor's head emerges from the surface of the earth; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Later, with freedom nearly within his grasp and his fellow inmates scattered throughout the Polish and German countrysides, McQueen tries to jump a stolen Nazi motorcycle over a barbed-wire border into Switzerland.
[Image: Border games; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
But that, too, does not work, and McQueen is thrown back into the cooler.
The rest of the film is peppered with counterfeit documents and rewoven clothes, secret desks inside tabletops and cupboards full of smuggled foods, homemade potato whiskey and, all along, the spaces of the tunnels themselves, three simultaneous acts of excavation that, in their real-life versions, were a "legendary feat of engineering," according to the New York Times.
[Images: One of the tunnels; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
As that article goes on to explain, a team of "British-based engineers, battlefield archaeologists and historians" recently tried to repeat the feat of digging these tunnels, producing a "replica tunnel" to test their theories of how the originals were created:
For more, check out the film itself.
(Thanks to Peter Smith for pointing out the New York Times article when it first came out! Up next: Escape from Alcatraz on Friday, February 17; posts about Cool Hand Luke and Papillon are forthcoming soon).
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
[Image: Stalag Luft III from The Great Escape; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC—continued recently with The Great Escape (1963), directed by John Sturges.
For those of you new to the fest, from January to April 2012 we will be watching a curated series of films at home, then discussing those films online; here is the complete schedule.
[Image: A guard tower from The Great Escape; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].As usual, I'll be focusing on the spatial premise of the film, not its directing, characterization, or dialogue; the idea is not to experiment in film criticism but to explore various scenarios of escape.
Also, as usual: there are spoilers ahead!
[Images: Establishing the camp; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].The film opens with the arrival of several truckloads of Allied war prisoners at a well-fortified German camp in the forests of western Poland. The lighthearted and substantially less than serious tone of the film is immediately made clear, however, not only through the jaunty title score but in the actions of the prisoners themselves as they spill out into their new environment.
Right away, escape is on their minds; we see them kneeling down to look for weaknesses beneath the boarding houses, scanning the barbed perimeter fence, and discussing the logistics of tunneling out into the woods beyond. In fact, several half-baked attempts at escape are made in the first few minutes of the film.
[Images: Looking for weaknesses; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].The prisoners disguise themselves as rural day workers, for instance, hoping to sneak out through the front gate, yard tools in hand—but they are spotted right away and sent back. Then several men camouflage themselves beneath forest debris, riding out on trucks under piles of pine branches—before the stabs of a menacing pitchfork convince them to pop out from this botanical ruse and surrender.
[Image: Humans disguised as trees; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].In short order, we learn that the camp was specifically built for these men. It takes its shape, we might say, in response to their past actions.
Flipping through the files of his newly arrived prisoners, and speaking with obvious exasperation as he reads their dossiers of escape—"escaped, recaptured, escaped, recaptured," Luftwaffe Colonel von Luger sighs, throwing files across his desk—the superintendent explains that the camp is, in fact, inescapable.
"There will be no escapes from this camp," he says flatly—to which the British Captain Ramsey replies that "it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they can't, it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability."
Escape is part of the soldiers' contract; it is something they are literally required to try to do.
[Images: Reading the files of failed escapes; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].But "it must stop," the Nazi insists—however, "it is because we expect the opposite that we have brought you here. This is a new camp. It has been built to hold you and your men. It is organized to incorporate all we have learned of security measures. And, in me, you will not be dealing with the common jailer."
Here, it's worth recalling that the film is based on a true story, and that the actual camp—called Stalag Luft III—was located for very specific topographical reasons, as if applying the concept of terroir to prison construction. More specifically, the sandy soil upon which the camp was built was seen as all but impossible to tunnel through.
Last month, on his fantastic blog Through the Sandglass, geologist Michael Welland discussed the film's geology of escape: "The prisoner of war camp was built, intentionally, on the sandy soils of the forests of today’s western Poland, along the banks of the Bóbr river. Intentionally, because the river valley is filled with sandy sediments deposited from melt waters of the Ice Age glaciers and carried by the ancestral Bóbr. And sand is difficult to tunnel through. Very difficult." Additionally—and much more visibly—"the excavated sand from the tunnels was immediately visible if deposited against the darker topsoil" outside, which leads to one of the escapees' more interesting innovations.
[Images: The relaxing technique of soiling a garden down your pant legs; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].One of the British POWs fabricates a kind of illicit earth-moving garment meant to be worn inside the prisoners' trousers; filled with dark soil from the tunnels soon underway beneath the boarding houses, these string-operated bags can be dumped surreptitiously into the gardens outside. This is reminiscent, of course, of the garden scene in Grand Illusion, which we watched last month, but it also allows for the oddly comic sight of prisoner after prisoner walking out into the garden, only to evacuate this terrestrial excess down their pant legs, literally soiling the sandy ground.
But this is not the only method the prisoners use for getting rid of surplus soil. In a surreal scene inside the camp's erstwhile cafeteria and study hall, exaggerated shudders begin to pass through the roof of the building, lurching and convulsing as if in an earthquake—which, in a sense, is exactly what's happening, as we learn that the diggers have begun storing their dirt above the rafters in the attic of the hall. Alas, the unbelievable rolling seismicity of this scene is the last we see or hear of this comically artificial tectonic activity.
[Image: James Garner looks up with alarm as artificial earthquake waves shudder through the roof; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].Which brings us to the buildings.
As in A Man Escaped, we see that, by dismantling the everyday environment in which we are trapped, we might reveal hidden tools of escape—and then to assemble ways out. In this case, the boarding houses are taken apart from within, their wooden planks strategically removed so as not to induce structural collapse (save for one scene involving an over-enthusiastic campmate collapsing through his newly weakened bed frame).
In the architectural equivalent of cutting hair with thinning scissors, the buildings are lightened of their wood, which is then taken below ground and assembled into bracing for the tunnels.
[Images: Steve McQueen as erstwhile Matta-Clark of the camp; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].As all this unfolds, the tunnels expand below.
In a well-composed shot, we see Charles Bronson—who has been unspooling string from one end of the tunnel to the other—join two fellow diggers to form a kind of string trigonometry at the tunnel head. Using a plumb bob and pencil, they—incorrectly, as we learn later—determine the tunnel's length.
[Images: Measuring the tunnel; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].But it's all for naught. The tunnel (one of three simultaneous excavations) is soon discovered. One of the Nazi guards inadvertently reveals it when he spills tea onto the floor of a boarding house kitchen; the water rapidly drains down through the tiles without trace, indicating some sort of void below. And into the void go the Nazis.
[Images: Discovering the tunnel with tea; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].In any case, I could recount the events of the film ad nauseam, as its procedural tracking of the tunneling process—which, luckily for the prisoners, included two other escape routes from which to choose next—lends itself well to description. But I'll instead just make a few final points, and then recommend that you check out the movie yourselves:
At one point early in the film, Steve McQueen's baseball-tossing character, Captain Virgil Hilts, proposes an absolutely idiotic method of escape, in which he and a fellow inmate will literally burrow through the earth "like moles," passing the dirt behind them, one at a time, as if swimming breaststroke through the solid matter of the planet. After detailing his ridiculous idea, McQueen self-confidently juts his head forward, making a kind of monkey face, as his future collaborator tries not to laugh beside him.
[Image: Steve McQueen wants to burrow through the earth like a mole; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].Unsurprisingly, however, the plan doesn't work.
[Image: Steve McQueen's mole fantasy remains tragically unfulfilled; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].Captain Hilts and his Scottish sidekick are almost immediately recaptured and sent to "the cooler," a building filled with unfurnished concrete cells (perhaps foreshadowing McQueen's role in Papillon a decade later).
But fear not! Oh, ye McQueenites. Captain Hilts later finds his odd terrestrial fantasy indirectly fulfilled when he has an opportunity to pop his head up out of a hole in the earth—like a mole!—and look back at the camp from which he is about to escape. He is beyond the camp's perimeter, though there is still a long way to go.
[Images: Steve McQueen as topography: the actor's head emerges from the surface of the earth; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].Later, with freedom nearly within his grasp and his fellow inmates scattered throughout the Polish and German countrysides, McQueen tries to jump a stolen Nazi motorcycle over a barbed-wire border into Switzerland.
[Image: Border games; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].But that, too, does not work, and McQueen is thrown back into the cooler.
The rest of the film is peppered with counterfeit documents and rewoven clothes, secret desks inside tabletops and cupboards full of smuggled foods, homemade potato whiskey and, all along, the spaces of the tunnels themselves, three simultaneous acts of excavation that, in their real-life versions, were a "legendary feat of engineering," according to the New York Times.
[Images: One of the tunnels; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].As that article goes on to explain, a team of "British-based engineers, battlefield archaeologists and historians" recently tried to repeat the feat of digging these tunnels, producing a "replica tunnel" to test their theories of how the originals were created:
The team’s task was to employ “reverse engineering” by uncovering the tunnels and what remained of the tunnelers’ jury-rigged equipment to replicate the wartime fliers’ ingenuity. Ultimately, the team members were stunned that, even without the menace of the ever-watchful Nazi camp guards, they were unable to match their wartime counterparts fully, particularly in the most crucial skill, digging a tunnel 30 feet below the camp surface without repeated collapses of the sandy soil above.The archaeological side of this 2011 investigation revealed the extent of the "improvisational engineering" we mentioned earlier, whereby everyday spaces and objects are dismantled and reassembled into tools of escape. For instance, the archaeologists uncovered "a set of rusting trolley wheels, the metal scavenged from remnants of a campsite stove and a coil spring taken from prison gramophones; wood paneling for the tunnel’s roof and sidewalls, fashioned from the prisoners’ bed boards; and a ventilation pump with a bellows and piping made from a prisoner’s kitbag, ice hockey sticks and tins of powdered milk. The pièce de résistance was a rusting radio made from a biscuit box, the wiring stolen from the prisoners’ huts and batteries scrounged from German guards."
For more, check out the film itself.
(Thanks to Peter Smith for pointing out the New York Times article when it first came out! Up next: Escape from Alcatraz on Friday, February 17; posts about Cool Hand Luke and Papillon are forthcoming soon).
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
The Pop It Up
The Pop It Up: The whole pop-up phenomenon just got a bit more literal, with the debut of tiny robots inspired by pop-up books.
[Image: The pop-up robot sheet, developed at Harvard].
Equal parts origami and electrical engineering, each robot "has 137 folding joints," PopSci explains. "The assembly scaffold, which has folds of its own, performs 22 origami-style folds, resulting in a fully formed robot you can pop out and turn on."
Science Daily points out that this "will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet."
[Image: A close-up of the pop-up sheet, courtesy of Harvard].
The system, developed at Harvard, "works by combining all the robots’ component layers, [and] sandwiching each piece of metal or carbon fiber into a single sheet. First each layer is laser-etched into the proper design, and the sheets are laminated together. The end result is a hexagonal sheet with a small assembly scaffold, with the whole thing the size of a U.S. quarter."
On a wildly different scale, and relevant only for reasons of formal resemblance, I'm reminded of Bernard Khoury's B 018 project in Beirut, a nightclub that "comes to life in the late hours of the night when its articulated roof structure constructed in heavy metal retracts hydraulically. The opening of the roof exposes the club to the world above and reveals the cityscape as an urban backdrop to the patrons below." Prior to that moment of retraction, Khoury's "building" is more like a highly compressed 2D surface.
[Images: B 018 by Bernard Khoury].
The point of this comparison being to wonder aloud what sorts of pop-up architecture might be possible using the sandwiched components technique described above. What might "soon allow clones of robotic buildings to be mass-produced by the sheet," if we could export and scale this up to the world of spatial design? 2D surfaces that pop-up—or pull down—into functional buildings.
[Image: A 2005 installation by Do-Ho Suh; photograph by Marcus Trimble].
Buildings that pop up out of city sidewalks; robots that pop up out of those buildings' floors; smaller buildings that pop up out of those pop-up robots; tiny, insect-sized robots that pop up out of them.
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
[Image: The pop-up robot sheet, developed at Harvard].Equal parts origami and electrical engineering, each robot "has 137 folding joints," PopSci explains. "The assembly scaffold, which has folds of its own, performs 22 origami-style folds, resulting in a fully formed robot you can pop out and turn on."
Science Daily points out that this "will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet."
[Image: A close-up of the pop-up sheet, courtesy of Harvard].The system, developed at Harvard, "works by combining all the robots’ component layers, [and] sandwiching each piece of metal or carbon fiber into a single sheet. First each layer is laser-etched into the proper design, and the sheets are laminated together. The end result is a hexagonal sheet with a small assembly scaffold, with the whole thing the size of a U.S. quarter."
On a wildly different scale, and relevant only for reasons of formal resemblance, I'm reminded of Bernard Khoury's B 018 project in Beirut, a nightclub that "comes to life in the late hours of the night when its articulated roof structure constructed in heavy metal retracts hydraulically. The opening of the roof exposes the club to the world above and reveals the cityscape as an urban backdrop to the patrons below." Prior to that moment of retraction, Khoury's "building" is more like a highly compressed 2D surface.
[Images: B 018 by Bernard Khoury].The point of this comparison being to wonder aloud what sorts of pop-up architecture might be possible using the sandwiched components technique described above. What might "soon allow clones of robotic buildings to be mass-produced by the sheet," if we could export and scale this up to the world of spatial design? 2D surfaces that pop-up—or pull down—into functional buildings.
[Image: A 2005 installation by Do-Ho Suh; photograph by Marcus Trimble].Buildings that pop up out of city sidewalks; robots that pop up out of those buildings' floors; smaller buildings that pop up out of those pop-up robots; tiny, insect-sized robots that pop up out of them.
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
HoverMast
HoverMast: 
[Image: The Sky Sapience HoverMast, via sUAS News].
The Israeli-made HoverMast is a "tethered hovering platform specially designed for small vehicles." As the consistently fascinating sUAS News explains:
But what are the architectural possibilities for tethered sky masts and other instant cities made from semi-autonomous drone infrastructure? Film sets dramatically gridded with airborne towers, capturing every detail from previously impossible angles; roads appearing in the middle of nowhere, marked only by illuminated HoverMasts popping-up in lieu of street lights; cities in a blackout throwing ad hoc masts of light up into the urban sky; pop-off architectural ornament that rises, tentacular, from rooftops to catch better cell phone signals; and so on.
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
[Image: The Sky Sapience HoverMast, via sUAS News].The Israeli-made HoverMast is a "tethered hovering platform specially designed for small vehicles." As the consistently fascinating sUAS News explains:
At the click of a button, the system autonomously deploys, rising to heights of up to 50 meters within 10-15 seconds. Secured by a cable, serving as a power supply and wideband data link, the highly stabilized HoverMast [... can also be mounted with sensing gear...] such as electro-optic sensors, laser designators, radar, and sophisticated COMINT and ELINT systems.While the HoverMast (also called "Sky Sapience") is currently being pitched to the only market that can afford it right now—that is, state-funded militaries, contractors, and police organizations—the availability of these and other semi-autonomous data gathering systems will continue to increase for the civilian realm (i.e. scientists, designers, artists, cartographers, and, as a lengthy new piece on Australia's ABC News explores, journalists).
But what are the architectural possibilities for tethered sky masts and other instant cities made from semi-autonomous drone infrastructure? Film sets dramatically gridded with airborne towers, capturing every detail from previously impossible angles; roads appearing in the middle of nowhere, marked only by illuminated HoverMasts popping-up in lieu of street lights; cities in a blackout throwing ad hoc masts of light up into the urban sky; pop-off architectural ornament that rises, tentacular, from rooftops to catch better cell phone signals; and so on.
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
American Psycho director brings bi-curious vampires to boarding school in The Moth Diaries [Trailer Frenzy]
American Psycho director brings bi-curious vampires to boarding school in The Moth Diaries [Trailer Frenzy]:
Writer and director Mary Harron made Patrick Bateman a household name in her American Psycho adaptation, and brought historical figures to life in I Shot Andy Warhol and The Notorious Bettie Page. Now she's out to see if she can make you care about vampires again in her indie boarding school horror flick The Moth Diaries. More »
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
Writer and director Mary Harron made Patrick Bateman a household name in her American Psycho adaptation, and brought historical figures to life in I Shot Andy Warhol and The Notorious Bettie Page. Now she's out to see if she can make you care about vampires again in her indie boarding school horror flick The Moth Diaries. More »
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
Forget tonight's Oscars, here are the Oscar predictions for the next five years [Futurism]
Forget tonight's Oscars, here are the Oscar predictions for the next five years [Futurism]:
Never Too Early Movie Predictions takes its Oscar predictions very seriously, calling the nominees and winners of not just this year's Oscars, but the Oscars through 2017. The short version: expect James Cameron to pick up a few statuettes for Battle Angel Alita. More »
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
Never Too Early Movie Predictions takes its Oscar predictions very seriously, calling the nominees and winners of not just this year's Oscars, but the Oscars through 2017. The short version: expect James Cameron to pick up a few statuettes for Battle Angel Alita. More »
http://banglamdfarid-com.webs.com/
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