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Cat Links 2022 Blog, Final Video Essay

[Video Essay] Disappearing City

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Disappearing City Director & Producer: Shizheng Liang. Music: Oneohtrix Point Never – Hospital Escape ／ Access-A-Ride The metro is a metaphor for the modern urban lifestyle, indicating the disappearance of traditional urban spaces. The metro is probably the best urban space to manifest modernity, as it operates almost as the opposite of walking through traditional streets. Travelers enter a portal under the city’s surface, loaded into a time/space capsule, travel through the city at a supra-biological speed that ignores any obstacles, and return through another passage, where the travelers are ignorant of the urban spatial structure. They do not know

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Cat Links 2022 Blog, Fieldwork

[FIELDWORK] HER, LUJIAZUI & WUJIAOCHANG

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HER, DIR. SPIKE JONZE (2013)            Lujiazui & Wujiaochang, Shanghai Warner Bros. released Her in 2013, a science-fiction romantic comedy film written, directed, and produced by Spike Jonze.1 Set in the near future, the protagonist, Theodore Twombly, is a letter writer who has just experienced the failure of his marriage. To dispel his loneliness, he buys a new operating system for his computer: the seductive, gentle, and humorous Samantha. Throughout the film, she has no face, only a voice. They fall in love, although Theodore keeps trying to have a relationship with a real woman. But this

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Cat Links Lecture 5: Urban Infrastructure as Event

Reading Response: Michel de Certeau

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Taking de Certeau’s insight further, space is a continuum of flowing places, an inescapable narrative. Thus every street is a book or a film, and every great city should be a great archive library. How do we read the street? By ‘practicing’ the places that constitute it, gazing at its vocabulary (vehicles, pedestrians, buildings), punctuation (signs, intersections), tone (colors, styles) are all clever ways of appreciating it, like what Perec practiced in Species of spaces. But the crucial thing is the syntax: how an elegant space is organized, just as a brilliant story is told. This brings me back to

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Cat Links Lecture 2: Filming the Modern Asian City

Reading Response: Ackbar Abbas

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Perhaps one of the most striking parallels between architecture and film is that they both reconstruct a hallucination of the bygone things. The illusory memories, like the metaphor in the architectural forms of Flagstaff House or Pei’s Bank of China Tower, are repeatedly reproduced after the real history has vanished and ironically becomes part of Hong Kong’s identity. Over twenty years ago, Abbas wrote about the disappearance of Hong Kong, or its false images through relentless urban renewal and chaotic architectural styles. Two decades on, it seems that the continuously intensifying marketization, the architectural anonymity, and even the anxiety of

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