Charles G. Miller
How To A Thick Surface, in the idiom of a tutorial video (For Capital) OR, How to conceptualize a z-axis extrusion in a material / geographic vector plain in the early part of the 21st century (5 over 1 mixed-use development)
2015 – DRAFT. 1080p, 14 min
An essay video in the idiom of a YouTube tutorial that presupposes viewers as macro-historical agents, and instructs them on the organization of geographic space to necessitate its conversion into capital. As a case study, the video focuses on a multi-unit, full-block residential typology that comprises most recent development in Downtown San Diego.
I’ll preface the multiple prongs of this project with a question: to what degree are the terms ecology and economy interchangeable, if both frameworks involve adaptation on the part of their agents and the forms these agents take is the direct result of adaption? The tutorial video is an adaptation to the YouTube “content”-creation/advertising ecology/economy that I’m trying to understand as a filmmaking idiom. The “5 over 1” “full-block” development is an adaptation of real estate development to the ecology/economy of civic constraints (expressed as building code and private property) and market demand. It also tends to be endemic to the sprawling characteristics of post-Jeffersonian-grid urbanization in the United States: “sun-belt” cities like San Diego (where I live) and Phoenix. Neither of these forms appear to be willfully invented, aesthetically or intellectually, rather emerge from a more ecological “field.” I owe this term to architect and theorist Stan Allen, and his seminal essay Field Conditions, which establishes the foundational concepts for a first-year design studio that I teach. With that in mind, I’ll conclude by mentioning pendantics, at play in this project, as a formal strategy. I’m not sure if it’s a joke or a tactic or both — or just an abject proclivity of the demographic I represent.
Video by and courtesy the artist.
Charles G. Miller is an artist and educator based in San Diego.