A possible future

Audiovisual and cognitive science

On screen, reality paradoxically seems truer to us, perhaps because for centuries we have ‘read’ it through icons, paintings, frescoes, sculptural groups. Perhaps the medium fascinates us so much because of the possibility of reproducing the event, which in the act of reproduction can become shared experience. And if in the field of art it is hard to interpret a single image, imagine being confronted with so great a number of meaningful ‘events’ in sequence.

The complex system of contents in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey is not to be sought in its spoken lines, as many critics mistakenly did when the film was released. Images and sounds are a ‘source of secrets’, a mine of symbols and meanings, which viewers enter through their own individual experience. Each person lives a different experience according to their own ability / willingness to access the manifold levels of understanding.

Do dreams speak to us above all through images? Is visual language an ancestral / universal form of communication, opposed to spoken language, fragmented into multiple forms by nation and geographical place?

Then there is the relationship between montage and dream experience. When I dream, the sequence is sometimes not continuous; it is as if there were cuts, passing from one shot to another, or from one place to another. I wonder whether this way of perceiving dream reality is conditioned by the experience of cinema and television, or whether it is a characteristic of dreaming, so that a nineteenth-century man dreamt with the same technique, one closely related to cinematic ‘montage’. In any case this connection is fascinating: 2001, with its expanses, its empty black screens and its silences, is hypnotic and evokes dreaming in general.

Music is no longer a garnish or a supposed embellishment but becomes a structural component of the work. It reinvents the semantic meaning of the elements through the unconventional association of music and images. Today, in the collective imagination of Western society, it is hard not to associate the music of The Blue Danube with astral landscapes. This shows that there are no appropriate associations, and that the concept that signifies the artistic object, which lies beyond time and space, can be extended beyond its original boundaries: a Viennese waltz becomes the symphony of the astral spheres. The act of association becomes a new artistic technique, allowing the ‘already existing’ to acquire new meanings, to become in a certain sense unprecedented. It is a way of ‘doing criticism’ with and on the elements used, and above all a way of ‘doing criticism’ through the creative act. Does this not bridge the split between art and criticism that belongs to the twentieth century? And further, is this not an interesting concept for a new way of interpreting architecture, contemporary and otherwise?

Is association more interesting than quotation? Perhaps it is. A comparison shows it. Quotation is a static element, it does not interact; association lives on relationship: two heterogeneous components give life to a third experience or artistic object.

Why is 2001 considered a ‘symphony’?

Montage, defined as the ‘art of sequence’, is close to music: unlike painting, which is a static representation that does not change over time, and unlike literary narrative, which must be imagined, it is structured on pauses, movements, rhythms, a sort of painting extended in time or a music of images, or, if you like, a ‘score of images and sounds’.

In montage, the act of one image turning into another has something architectural about it, as one passes from one ‘view of a space’ into another.

In architecture too, space reveals itself through a visual continuum in time. But the peculiarity of montage, what makes it singular, is the cut, the intentional association of parts, the spatial leaps between different points of view and different places, improbable if not impossible in the ‘continuous’ vision of a human being, except in dreams and in the imagination, where perceived reality sometimes does not necessarily have a continuous vision.

The advent of sound recording techniques makes it possible to render the sound event independent of its natural source. This technological innovation allows the composition of musical scores in which, alongside traditional instruments, elements previously considered ‘noise’ appear, consequently calling into question the boundary between music and noise. Examples are the theories of John Cage and, in pop-rock, Pink Floyd. Sound cinema is the most immediate vehicle for binding sounds and images. There are two possible ways: the conventional one, associating with the apparent source, in the image, the corresponding sound; another possibility, certainly more interesting, is the way Kubrick uses sound to signify the event on film through the most improbable associations. It is no accident that the Floyd’s music has a cinematic quality, not only for its slow tempos but for the sound events overdubbed onto the tracks. In that case the sound event suggests an image of a source that is not there, and that we will never see, we can only imagine it, prompting a reflection on the decontextualisation of the sound event.

Architecture. 2001 and history

Cinema is a means of linguistic diffusion for architecture.

Are the interiors of the Discovery – the spaceship that travels towards Jupiter in the film – paradoxically better known to the general public than Villa Savoye or Fallingwater? This raises the question of the role of cinema in defining modern architecture. Above all, it is interesting to understand how it transformed the original meaning of the ‘architectural modern’ through the modern–space association.

Kubrick synthesised everything futuristic scattered across the market and in the minds of designers and turned it into a possible future, one that will probably never exist in this form, even though the convergences of certain concepts are remarkable. It is an ‘ideal’ future, and a few years later Kubrick himself would be aware of it: in making A Clockwork Orange it is as if he wanted to tell us: we could have been like this (2001), but the future we will have deserved is another one (A Clockwork Orange).

In some respects it is the reverse of fantasy novels such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and those that followed, except that this time it is not the past that is reinvented but the future that is imagined through the eyes of the present, and all the intentions of that period pour into it.

Among the most striking things in 2001 is its synthesis of the architectural icons of the twentieth century. Many forms in the film draw on existing architecture: the monolith recalls Mies van der Rohe’s wall planes, the spheres of the spaceships Boullée’s cenotaph for Newton, the fuel containers of the Discovery and the city on the Moon refer to Archigram’s Plug-in City megastructures, the seating by Olivier Mourgue, and further echoes of Saarinen, Eames, Panton, Colombo.

Kubrick intentionally traces a subtle connection between the French Enlightenment and modern architecture. It is certainly a linear view of the evolution of the language, one that would be contradicted, for better and for worse, by the post-modern that followed.

The connection can be read in the film’s elementary solid geometries. Some references for the ‘head’ of the Discovery: the Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers (c. 1200): ‘God is a sphere with as many circumferences as there are points’; the revolutionary architects Ledoux and Boullée; the spheres in the sky of René Magritte’s painting Voice of Space (1931).

The orbiting station resembles a wheel, or a Celtic cross, or the Ferris wheel of the Prater in Vienna, from the late nineteenth century.

Minimalist sculpture is a reference for the black parallelepiped monolith.

Why is this ‘religious totem’ a parallelepiped with the geometric ratios 1 : 4 : 9, derived from the squares of the first three integers (1×1, 2×2, 3×3)? It remains to be understood whether these ratios have a counterpart in historical architecture.

Late eighteenth-century interiors are the model for the ‘alien room’ at the end of the film. It is the architecture of the French Enlightenment: that of the scientific cabinets depicted in eighteenth-century prints.

The space, with no openings to the outside, is flooded by a light that comes from the floor. It conveys a sense of suspension, models the eighteenth-century decorations in chiaroscuro, eliminates cast shadows. The room also reveals Kubrick’s interest in Napoleon and the Enlightenment.

This could offer a key to reading it: once the journey is complete, ‘humankind’ returns to its astral home, and the higher entity might have built the room in that way to convey a symbolic meaning.

2001 encoded the best of the culture of its period on an indelible and transmissible medium, and we still remain irresistibly fascinated by it today.

Psychedelic. A new way of perceiving

Psychedelic describes an experience that, supposedly, frees the mind from the superstructures imposed by the social order.

The word ‘Odyssey’ holds an explicit reference to Homer’s work, the return of Ulysses towards home, and it is no accident that the film is the story of humanity from its birth in the African plains, at the hands of an alien intelligence, to its return home to its astral parents, in another galaxy.

In the third section of the film, ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’, which metaphorically tells us of Dave’s transformation from man to superman (Nietzsche), this transformation is a ‘trip’ that coincides with the simulation of a psychedelic experience, through LSD.

The journey has a metaphorical value. The meaning of life is reflected in it. Life is a journey, but when we travel we feel homesick; it is good to return home, but returning home also means the end of the journey, and therefore of life itself. And 2001 too is the journey back to the possible ‘astral’ origin of man.

All this could explain why 2001 is considered a film with a religious theme: psychotic anxieties, the Oedipus complex, who our ancestral parents are.

In music, psychedelia meets the film in Pink Floyd. A website suggests that the final sequence of 2001 inspired one of the Floyd’s most important ‘suites’: Echoes. Does Kubrick use music for montage just as the Floyd used montage for music? The duration of the composition, about 23 minutes, is the same, and the changes of scene also bear a mutual relation to the music. The art of sequence is common to both.

‘The Ultimate Trip’ – a few years after its release, the film was relaunched with that slogan – is in a certain sense a turning point for the underground world; Kubrick’s film in fact proposes a new language, passing on to us the best of the underground experiences. Although by training and generation he was entirely foreign to that movement, he manages to carry its most interesting elements into the state of the art. This capacity to stand beyond the historical context, this ‘clinical’ vision of reality, is an extraordinary quality of Kubrick’s art.

In architecture, psychedelia manifests itself in radical design. The soft enveloping surface that characterises Verner Panton’s Phantasy Landscape (Visiona 2, 1970) might suggest an aesthetic of weightlessness, which makes the traditional divisions between walls and ceiling irrelevant. In this sense it is psychedelic, because it goes beyond the pre-established social order.

Technology. Human – machine interface

This chapter concerns the desktops, panels with buttons and various indicators, that allow the machines in the film to be operated. This aspect of 2001 bears an immediate relation to contemporary design: consider the design of information technology (IT).

Could an alternative definition of architecture not be that of an interface between human beings and lived space? And in this interface can we not read the quality of use? And further, would it be a risk to make the quality of use coincide with that of architecture? Approached from this point of view, this should probably be the task of architecture today, going beyond the now obsolete design of the masonry building.

The cockpit of the Discovery, and in particular the space defined by black surfaces and buttons backlit in different colours, is perhaps one of the most fascinating architectural compositions; the monitor screens, too, display data on a black background: walls as screens?

Production and language

This theme could be relevant to understanding the cultural regression that characterises our present time. It is rarely taken into consideration, but in my view it is the key to the problem.

Music, Cinema and even so-called ‘Contemporary Art’ are in thrall to the perverse allure of large-scale distribution: record companies, film distributors and art galleries respectively. All this flattens any experimentation, which to be such, as history teaches, must necessarily challenge the pre-established order, which in our case is that of the ‘market’.

So far we have spoken of other fields. But art is fluid, and we can apply the same concepts to architecture. The theme of production has its paraphrase in the client, small or large as it may be. Designers are usually blamed; I believe the problem lies above all with producers and their perverse, anti-cultural and narrowly commercial way of approaching design. The problem of a new architecture lies not in architecture but in an economic and social system that is by now obsolete.

Those who know Kubrick will perhaps have understood the reason for this chapter in a study of 2001. Kubrick’s art, without Kubrick the producer, would probably never have existed.

So what? Should the architect become the producer of their projects in order to make serious architecture today, so that the philosophy of the project is not destroyed at the production stage? In the 1960s Archigram produced only visions of architecture and conceptual exhibitions, without compromising with reality. But this is the paradoxical destiny of true contemporary architecture: to remain unrealised.

Perhaps Paolo Soleri, in Arizona, follows this path consistently. With a few youthful exceptions, he has always produced architecture first for Cosanti, then for Arcosanti – the two scientific and cultural foundations he directs – consistently following his design philosophy, without any concession to the ‘capitalist’ economic system. It does not matter that for now his work is far from the multimedia clamour and the fashionable magazines. History often overturns the priorities assigned by the news of the day, conditioned as it is by profit and instant success. Those who create for history, and not for fashions and ephemeral trends, endure; the others will soon be forgotten.

Notes

1. ^ Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey [film], Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.
2. ^ Johann Strauss II, An der schönen blauen Donau, op. 314, Vienna, 1867.
3. ^ Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange [film], Polaris Productions, Warner Bros., 1971.
4. ^ J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1966 (Il Signore degli Anelli, trans. Vicky Alliata di Villafranca, thirty-first edition, Rusconi Libri, Milan, 1997).
5. ^ Anonymous, Liber viginti quattuor philosophorum, ed. Françoise Hudry, Brepols, Turnhout, 1997, def. XVIII (Il libro dei ventiquattro filosofi, ed. Paolo Lucentini, Adelphi, Milan, 1999).
6. ^ René Magritte, La Voix des airs, 1931, oil on canvas, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
7. ^ Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hutchinson, London, 1968 (2001: Odissea nello spazio, trans. Bruno Oddera, Longanesi, Milan, 1969).
8. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen [1883–1885] (Così parlò Zarathustra. Un libro per tutti e per nessuno, trans. Sossio Giametta, ed. Giangiorgio Pasqualotto, BUR Classici, Rizzoli, Milano, 1999).
9. ^ Pink Floyd, Meddle, Harvest Records, London, 1971.
10. ^ Mike Kaplan, ‘An insider sets the record straight on 2001: A Space Odyssey’, eatdrinkfilms.com, 28 Apr. 2019.
11. ^ Antonietta Iolanda Lima, Paolo Soleri: architettura come ecologia umana, Jaca Book, Milan, 2000.

References

• Philippe Garner, Sixties Design, Taschen, Cologne, 2001.
• Stephanie Schwam (ed.), The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, introduction by Jay Cocks, Modern Library, New York, 2000.
• Michel Ciment, Kubrick, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1999 (Kubrick, trans. Lorenzo Codelli, second edition, Rizzoli, Milan, 2000, pp. 125‑134).
• Claudia Mongini, Giovanni Mongini, Storia del cinema di fantascienza, vol. 3: dal 1961 al 1968, Fanucci, Rome, 1999.
• John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, HarperCollins, London, 1997 (Stanley Kubrick: la biografia, trans. Enrico Cerasuolo and Andrea Serafini, Lindau, Turin, 1999, pp. 241‑276).
• Glenn Povey, Ian Russell, Pink Floyd: In the Flesh. The Complete Performance History, Bloomsbury, London, 1997 (Pink Floyd: un sogno in technicolor. Trent’anni di storia e di concerti, trans. Michele Lauro, Giunti, Florence, 1998).
• Paola Colaiacomo, Vittoria C. Caratozzolo, La Londra dei Beatles, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1996.
• Piers Bizony, 2001: Filming the Future, introduction by Arthur C. Clarke, Aurum Press, London, 1994.
• Nicholas Schaffner, Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, Harmony Books, New York, 1991 (Pink Floyd: uno scrigno di segreti, trans. Paolo Bertrando, Arcana, Milan, 1993, pp. 9‑156).
• Gene D. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey, Popular Library, New York, 1975.
• Carolyn Geduld, Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1973.
• Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, New American Library, New York, 1972.
• Jerome Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, New American Library, New York, 1970.
• Jean-Paul Dumont, Jean Monod, Le Fœtus astral: essai d’analyse structurale d’un mythe cinématographique, Christian Bourgois, Paris, 1970.
• Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hutchinson, London, 1968 (2001: Odissea nello spazio, trans. Bruno Oddera, Longanesi, Milan, 1969).
• J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1966 (Il Signore degli Anelli, trans. Vicky Alliata di Villafranca, thirty-first edition, Rusconi Libri, Milan, 1997).