‘Is it me, or is it getting crazier out there?’: The psyche of the interior in Joker: An analysis of psychological space in Todd Phillips Joker (2019) through collage

Encounters with interior spaces are influenced by past experiences and state of mind. Much of how architecture is experienced therefore is not readily apparent and is sensed rather than seen. Psyche impacts this experience of lived space, from an individual’s awareness of themselves within it, to the perception of space itself. Film offers a distinctive representation of this subjective experience through its narrative form and command of visual, audio and temporal language. The emotive and visceral power of film render it an accessible and immersive medium, and as such make it uniquely placed to communicate less tangible qualities of space and character. This paper analyses the use of interior space in the film Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019). The acutely intimate discernment of the protagonist’s interior environment is the result of environmental and psychological disruption, where boundaries break down between the real and imaginary, and the surreal intrudes upon the tangible depiction of the interior. The exposition of the character’s damaged psyche within space is analysed at key points within the narrative, using collage as an exploratory, visual methodology to analyse and experiment with, to potentially reveal the less perceivable, yet invasive intangible layers of lived space. This article addresses the frequent oversight of psychological qualities of the interior in architectural discourse, through an analytical and experimental method rendering the psychological content of space visible. Defining this intangible nature of architecture as the psychosphere (or the psychological atmosphere), I term this technique the ‘psychospheric collage method’. The process consists of interrogating expressive film language and content through an architectural lens documented through sketching, storyboarding and textual enquiry. From these fragmented components I compose a new visual language capable of signifying the layered psychological atmosphere in which a character resides, thus facilitating its consideration within architectural design and enabling articulation of our intimate encounter with the interior

TECHNE Issue 02

The second issue of TECHNE, an annual publication of student work from the Department of Architecture at the New York City College of Technology. Edited by faculty members Ting Chin, Michael Duddy, and Jason Montgomery, this issue includes contributions from Danny Batista, Jason Sai Hung, Heidi Cherubin, Michelle Yang, Laura Calle, Carlos Jacome, Carolina Walters, Hito Rodriguez, Carlin Baez, Brendan Sigvardsson Cooney, Mimu Sakuma, Anton Sukaj, Marie Baretsky, Tatiana Zheludkova, Moises Reyes, Brendan Edwards, Desiree Andrade, Felipe Arellano, Shadeen Dixon, Tam Huiying, Melissa Benitez, Carlos Jacome, Kilton Shehu, Daniel Mego, Marie Baretsky, Jin Chen, Heraldi Sadmojo, Luiza De Souza, Kate Sanko, Bertol Dragani, Charles Happel, Rithol Clytus, Maria Genao, Bertoli Dragani, Jason Ng, Michelle Matthews, Anastasiia Shaiukova, Enny Filpo, Vladislav Valentinov, Raymond Jimenez, Catherine Brito, Andrea Garrido, Genaro Cobar, Batista Rodriguez, and Nicole Ordonez. Table of Contents: INTRODUCTIONS Introduction Ting Chin, Assistant Professor--p. 7 Abstraction and Architecture Jason Montgomery, Assistant Professor--p. 801 DIAGRAMMING--p. 16 02 ITERATION--p. 30 03 MODELING/ MASSING--p. 42 04 REPRESENTATION--p. 54 05 DESIGN CONCEPT--p. 98 06 THE CITY--p. 124On the Abstract and the Real in the Urban Architecture Design Studio Amira Joelson, Associate Adjunct Professor--p. 128 Reflection on the City and Urban Design Bertol Dragani, Third Year Student--p. 131 07 DIGITAL DESIGN--p. 15

Support tools for 3D game creation

Nowadays, tools for developing videogames are a very important part of the development process in the game industry. Such tools are used to assist game developers in their tasks, allowing them to create functional games while writing a few lines of code. For example, these tools allow the users to import the content for the game, set the game logic, or produce the source code and compile it. There are several tasks and components regarding the development of videogames that may become unproductive, therefore, it’s necessary to automate and/or optimize such tasks. For example, the programming of events or dialogs can be a task that consumes too much time in the development cycle, and a tedious and repetitive task for the programmer. For this reason, the use of tools to support these tasks can be very important to increase productivity and help on the maintenance of the various processes that involve the development of videogames. This dissertation aims to demonstrate the advantages of the use of these kind of tools during the development of videogames, presenting a case study involving the development of a Serious Game entitled Clean World.Atualmente, as ferramentas para o desenvolvimento de jogos são uma parte bastante importante de todo o processo de desenvolvimento. Estas ferramentas servem para assistir os criadores de jogos nas tarefas que realizam, permitindo-lhes a criação de jogos funcionais escrevendo poucas linhas de código. Desenvolver um videojogo sem a utilização de ferramentas especializadas é um processo complexo e que consome bastante tempo, daí a existência de ferramentas que permitem ao utilizador importar os conteúdos para o jogo, definir a lógica de jogo, produzir o código fonte e compilá-lo. Este tipo de software é normalmente utilizado por quem se dedica à criação de jogos como hobby, ou por profissionais que procuram otimizar o processo de desenvolvimento de jogos. Existem várias componentes ao nível do desenvolvimento de videojogos que se tornam pouco produtivas, se não forem automatizados e/ou otimizadas. Por exemplo, a programação de eventos ou de diálogos pode ser uma tarefa que consome demasiado tempo no ciclo de desenvolvimento, para além de ser uma tarefa entediante e repetitiva no ponto de vista do programador. Por este motivo, a utilização de ferramentas pode ser muito importante no que diz respeito ao aumento da produtividade e manutenção dos vários processos que envolvem o desenvolvimento de videojogos. Nesta dissertação pretendemos demonstrar as vantagens da utilização dessas mesmas ferramentas durante o desenvolvimento de videojogos, através da apresentação de um caso de estudo que envolve o desenvolvimento de um Serious Game intitulado Clean World. Em Clean World, foram identificadas determinadas tarefas que se mostraram demasiado repetitivas e entediantes quando programadas por inteiro, como é o caso da adição, modificação ou remoção de componentes como diálogos, quest ou items. Tendo em conta este problema concreto, foram criadas algumas ferramentas de forma a aumentar a produtividade no desenvolvimento do jogo, tornando tarefas repetitivas e entediantes em processos simples e intuitivos. O conjunto de ferramentas é constituído por: Item Manager, Quest Manager, Dialog Manager e Terrain Creator

Light, Vitality, and Dynamism: An Introduction Of Time And Movement Into Theatre Lighting

This thesis explores the dynamic possibilities of composing with light in the theatre as an autonomous medium. Through an archaeology of concept, it identifies the non-dynamic elements inherent to traditional theatre lighting such as the need for illumination, the linearity, the emphasis on spacial thinking over temporal thinking and the focus on visual images over in-depth experience. These elements shaped lighting practice as a predefined technical tool activating other mediums - culminating in a non-dynamic and rigid practice- instead of considering it as a performative and active element in itself. A comparison with Light Art, complemented with insight from psychology, unveils that time and movement are missing to the feeling of vitality triggered by a dynamic light. The thesis thus speculates on how to conceptually and technically reintroduce these fundamental elements of dynamism into stage lighting design, promoting a polyphonic and polyrhythmic temporal model over a linear and spacial one, as well as a performative approach over a predefined one. In this view, the creative process, the creation tools and the performance model are revised

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Modeling and real-time rendering of participating media using the GPU

Cette thèse traite de la modélisation, l'illumination et le rendu temps-réel de milieux participants à l'aide du GPU. Dans une première partie, nous commençons par développer une méthode de rendu de nappes de brouillard hétérogènes pour des scènes en extérieur. Le brouillard est modélisé horizontalement dans une base 2D de fonctions de Haar ou de fonctions B-Spline linéaires ou quadratiques, dont les coefficients peuvent être chargés depuis une textit{fogmap}, soit une carte de densité en niveaux de gris. Afin de donner au brouillard son épaisseur verticale, celui-ci est doté d'un coefficient d'atténuation en fonction de l'altitude, utilisé pour paramétrer la rapidité avec laquelle la densité diminue avec la distance au milieu selon l'axe Y. Afin de préparer le rendu temps-réel, nous appliquons une transformée en ondelettes sur la carte de densité du brouillard, afin d'en extraire une approximation grossière (base de fonctions B-Spline) et une série de couches de détails (bases d'ondelettes B-Spline), classés par fréquence.%Les détails sont ainsi classés selon leur fréquence et, additionnées, permettent de retrouver la carte de densité d'origine. Chacune de ces bases de fonctions 2D s'apparente à une grille de coefficients. Lors du rendu sur GPU, chacune de ces grilles est traversée pas à pas, case par case, depuis l'observateur jusqu'à la plus proche surface solide. Grâce à notre séparation des différentes fréquences de détails lors des pré-calculs, nous pouvons optimiser le rendu en ne visualisant que les détails les plus contributifs visuellement en avortant notre parcours de grille à une distance variable selon la fréquence. Nous présentons ensuite d'autres travaux concernant ce même type de brouillard : l'utilisation de la transformée en ondelettes pour représenter sa densité via une grille non-uniforme, la génération automatique de cartes de densité et son animation à base de fractales, et enfin un début d'illumination temps-réel du brouillard en simple diffusion. Dans une seconde partie, nous nous intéressons à la modélisation, l'illumination en simple diffusion et au rendu temps-réel de fumée (sans simulation physique) sur GPU. Notre méthode s'inspire des Light Propagation Volumes (volume de propagation de lumière), une technique à l'origine uniquement destinée à la propagation de la lumière indirecte de manière complètement diffuse, après un premier rebond sur la géométrie. Nous l'adaptons pour l'éclairage direct, et l'illumination des surfaces et milieux participants en simple diffusion. Le milieu est fourni sous forme d'un ensemble de bases radiales (blobs), puis est transformé en un ensemble de voxels, ainsi que les surfaces solides, de manière à disposer d'une représentation commune. Par analogie aux LPV, nous introduisons un Occlusion Propagation Volume, dont nous nous servons, pour calculer l'intégrale de la densité optique entre chaque source et chaque autre cellule contenant soit un voxel du milieu, soit un voxel issu d'une surface. Cette étape est intégrée à la boucle de rendu, ce qui permet d'animer le milieu participant ainsi que les sources de lumière sans contrainte particulière. Nous simulons tous types d'ombres : dues au milieu ou aux surfaces, projetées sur le milieu ou les surfacesThis thesis deals with modeling, illuminating and rendering participating media in real-time using graphics hardware. In a first part, we begin by developing a method to render heterogeneous layers of fog for outdoor scenes. The medium is modeled horizontally using a 2D Haar or linear/quadratic B-Spline function basis, whose coefficients can be loaded from a fogmap, i.e. a grayscale density image. In order to give to the fog its vertical thickness, it is provided with a coefficient parameterizing the extinction of the density when the altitude to the fog increases. To prepare the rendering step, we apply a wavelet transform on the fog's density map, and extract a coarse approximation and a series of layers of details (B-Spline wavelet bases).These details are ordered according to their frequency and, when summed back together, can reconstitute the original density map. Each of these 2D function basis can be viewed as a grid of coefficients. At the rendering step on the GPU, each of these grids is traversed step by step, cell by cell, since the viewer's position to the nearest solid surface. Thanks to our separation of the different frequencies of details at the precomputations step, we can optimize the rendering by only visualizing details that contribute most to the final image and abort our grid traversal at a distance depending on the grid's frequency. We then present other works dealing with the same type of fog: the use of the wavelet transform to represent the fog's density in a non-uniform grid, the automatic generation of density maps and their animation based on Julia fractals, and finally a beginning of single-scattering illumination of the fog, where we are able to simulate shadows by the medium and the geometry. In a second time, we deal with modeling, illuminating and rendering full 3D single-scattering sampled media such as smoke (without physical simulation) on the GPU. Our method is inspired by light propagation volumes, a technique whose only purpose was, at the beginning, to propagate fully diffuse indirect lighting. We adapt it to direct lighting, and the illumination of both surfaces and participating media. The medium is provided under the form of a set of radial bases (blobs), and is then transformed into a set of voxels, together with solid surfaces, so that both entities can be manipulated more easily under a common form. By analogy to the LPV, we introduce an occlusion propagation volume, which we use to compute the integral of the optical density, between each source and each other cell containing a voxel either generated from the medium, or from a surface. This step is integrated into the rendering process, which allows to animate participating media and light sources without any further constraintPARIS-EST-Université (770839901) / SudocSudocFranceF

a wheel inside a wheel

Getting lost in nature, I can sense the unfixity of its countless forms and processes. Recurring patterns at micro and macro scale arise from creative and destructive forces in space and time; reality appears simultaneously constant and impermanent. My thesis work, a wheel inside a wheel, explores the self in relation to contemporary conceptions of reality. I look at static and dynamic representations of stripped-down patterns modeled from nature, like circular bursts, splintering branches, or the meander of a wave. The action-based works on paper and cloth leverage invisible forces and signal permanency and physical embodiment, deepened through an engagement with archetypal materials. Time-based media renders an altogether separate point of view. Presenting documentary footage alongside artifacts of this abstraction practice, I speculate on the role sensing and recording technologies have in altering perceptions and observations of reality

DEsignBench: Exploring and Benchmarking DALL-E 3 for Imagining Visual Design

We introduce DEsignBench, a text-to-image (T2I) generation benchmark tailored for visual design scenarios. Recent T2I models like DALL-E 3 and others, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating photorealistic images that align closely with textual inputs. While the allure of creating visually captivating images is undeniable, our emphasis extends beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. We aim to investigate the potential of using these powerful models in authentic design contexts. In pursuit of this goal, we develop DEsignBench, which incorporates test samples designed to assess T2I models on both "design technical capability" and "design application scenario." Each of these two dimensions is supported by a diverse set of specific design categories. We explore DALL-E 3 together with other leading T2I models on DEsignBench, resulting in a comprehensive visual gallery for side-by-side comparisons. For DEsignBench benchmarking, we perform human evaluations on generated images in DEsignBench gallery, against the criteria of image-text alignment, visual aesthetic, and design creativity. Our evaluation also considers other specialized design capabilities, including text rendering, layout composition, color harmony, 3D design, and medium style. In addition to human evaluations, we introduce the first automatic image generation evaluator powered by GPT-4V. This evaluator provides ratings that align well with human judgments, while being easily replicable and cost-efficient. A high-resolution version is available at https://github.com/design-bench/design-bench.github.io/raw/main/designbench.pdf?download=Comment: Project page at https://design-bench.github.io

Creating Common Ground: Architecture For Tactical Learning and Creative Convergence

Certain environments can inhibit learning and stifle enthusiasm, while others enhance learning or stimulate curiosity. Furthermore, in a world where technological change is accelerating we could ask how might architecture connect resource abundant and resource scarce innovation environments? Innovation environments developed out of necessity within urban villages and those developed with high intention and expectation within more institutionalized settings share a framework of opportunity for addressing change through learning and education. This thesis investigates formal and informal learning environments and how architecture can stimulate curiosity, enrich learning, create common ground, and expand access to education. The reason for this thesis exploration is to better understand how architects might design inclusive environments that bring people together to build sustainable infrastructure encouraging innovation and adaptation to change for years to come. The context of this thesis is largely based on Colin McFarlane’s theory that the “city is an assemblage for learning” The socio-spatial perspective in urbanism, considers how built infrastructure and society interact. Through the urban realm, inhabitants learn to negotiate people, space, politics, and resources affecting their daily lives. The city is therefore a dynamic field of emergent possibility. This thesis uses the city as a lens through which the boundaries between informal and formal logics as well as the public and private might be blurred. Through analytical processes I have examined the environmental devices and assemblage of factors that consistently provide conditions through which learning may thrive. These parameters that make a creative space significant can help suggest the design of common ground environments through which innovation is catalyzed