Transcirpt of Presentation at VizNet event, Birmingham

19th June, 2007

Gregory Sporton

Ok I guess most of you will already have seen the presentation I gave last time at Loughborough, and I thought today I would just have a look at one or two things. One issue that for me seems to come out fairly regularly, as people know my background is, I work here in the department of art, and I thought it was worth looking at something like this. This is a VRML reconstruction of Konstantin Melnikov, the Dom Melnikov, I don’t know if you know this building but it is in Moscow, and it is not one of my own I will hasten to add,

VRML model of Melnikov House

but it is extremely interesting because I am able to take this very nice building and turn it around and I can do all this fun stuff with it. You can see around the back there these fantastic windows and Melnikov was a constructivist who worked just after the revolution, slightly before, but mostly after the revolution, up until about 1930 when Stalin put a stop to him being an architect but in fact this is a very important historical building as well as a very beautiful aesthetic building, given that it was one of the few private houses, or one of the few homes in private ownership in the former Soviet Union, up until very recently or at least the last 10 years or so.

You can see that one of the things we can do with this sort of VRML stuff, we can turn this all around and do all kinds of fun stuff and see it from all kinds of interesting angles. We can also go inside it, there is a means by which we can traverse the place from indoors, and indeed pass through the walls and do all sorts of fun stuff.

Melnikov had a particular view of how new building ought to take place and that was that it ought to be providing, every part of the environment ought to be providing you with different sorts of stimulus, for what you are up to.

Now the reason to show this may not be immediately clear but I hope it is a little more clear after I do this. This is the actual Melnikov house.

This is Dom Melnikova. You can see - just here is the actual sign on the front of the house - you might have seen on the visualisation there is a little sign there but this is the actual sign for non-Russian speakers it says 'A monument of architectural and historical importance, this is the house of the architect Constantin Stepanovic Melnikov'. There is quite an interesting difference in some senses between that and the kind of indications that you are getting in the visualisation, which is after all the way most people are going to experience this house these days. This is the front facade, interestingly you can see the sycamores growing, the day I visited they had cut down the day before, they had actually cut the grass because it was about 4 ft high, so they cut the grass but they hadn’t got rid of all the sycamores around the property,.

This again, far from the nice smooth surfaces that we were looking at before in the visualisation, you actually see how those windows actually work. They are rendered concrete laid over brick and there are a few photographs of how they were originally done, you can see there the grass that they have just cut, and Russian weeds, I don’t know if you have ever been in Russia during the summer, but the vegetation grows, like you can watch it growing, it has a very short growing season, so it grows virtually infront of your eyes.

This is a little bit of the side of the house, again you get some idea of the colour change, there is a red brick chimney that sticks out at an oblique angle, through the middle of it, and because of course we are actually seeing it in its appropriate colours, it makes a bit more sense.

This is the chap who helped organise my little visit, he is the head of looking after architectural monuments in Moscow so he has a pretty busy time because he doesn’t have much money, and there are a lot of people demanding various things from him. This is actually him with his fiancee, and we are at the back of the house, looking towards the front, as it were.

This gentleman is actually Melnikov’s son. And Melnikov’s son is a fairly irascible sort of chap, he is about 87, and there has been a lot of problems with this property simply because he won’t let you inside. he is very adamant that nobody goes in. One of the interesting features of Melnikov’s original design was that the bed is made out of concrete, and can’t be moved, so upstairs and indeed his own bed, in the original design, Melnikov and his wife sleep in one part of a very large room up the top and Melnikov’s son, there is a specific area for Melnikov’s son which is really just across a kind of threshold, but again that is only according to the plans, nobody has actually been inside this building in any serious way , there have been some photographs that I have seen taken inside this building, but they are comparatively rare. So we have some idea from the plans and things how these things work.

But as you can see he is not a man to be trifled with, I can promise you. I brought the prettiest girl I could find to charm him into letting us into the house, but it just didn’t work.

You can see this is us coming along the side here giving you some idea of the height of this property, but you will note that again we are back at the front of the house, and you will note that I haven’t been able to show you anything like the way the visualisation begins and that is because this is the view that we actually see. Just to go back to the visualisation.

if I take you back to its very front, you can’t possible see the house from this angle. It is just not possible, the street is too narrow, the fence is too high, the sycamores are too thick, there is no chance of seeing it this way. There is also no chance of seeing it this way. because the yard is too small, and the apartment building to the left of it is simply too close, so you won’t see it this way. And you won’t see it this way, because Melnikov’s son won’t let you.

Now I think there are some very interesting lessons to be drawn from that, in terms of what it is we are doing when we are visualising and I mentioned this once before that we have the tendency to develop a model of reality from the reality of a model. I think probably for me that would be the central argument about how we conduct ourselves doing visualisation.

The other example I might have shown today and I did a bit of work on it but for some reason we can’t get a proper internet connection, but what I was going to show was a range of 3D visualisations of the DNA, the most famous visualisation of all was the DNA, the double helix, It is amazing when you go through the numbers of variations of that visualisation, how many variations there is of that, and how many people have been taught, presumably different things, as a result of looking at that visually, and we use these visual cues, in order to give us, a very clear idea of the world, and that is why we get ourselves involved in visualisation,. simply because the data is too thick, for us simply to take the text or the numbers, and turn it into something that we can comprehend, and that is what we are doing when we are doing visualisation , that is why it behoves us, to be important, the manner in which our visualisations are developed and can be used.