Rikke Munck Petersen

Drone usage in fieldwork and participatory processes entails direct sensations that fold the pilot/planner and audience into one. Footage from drone filming entails direct kinesthetic and synesthetic effects that occur while one edits the film material, giving rise to affective responses. Through one experimental drone postproduction film, this article discusses how the interplay of vision, motion, and sound works as a set of gestures that comprise sensation as a (self- and co-) affection modus of immediation when one engages with moving images on-screen during drone filming, editing, and screening. The article builds upon Merleau-Ponty’s film writings and Puig de la Bellacasa’s touch/care perspectives. Specifically, it asks what constitutive aspects characterize the folding of the drone’s/pilot’s point of view (POV) in relation to the perceiver’s POV during postediting, and to the conceiver’s POV during subsequent viewings. The article’s original contribution is to show how affective experiences are transposed as haptic touch via the same images and folded POVs. It also addresses a research methodological perspective on filmic mediations and written accounts. The article concludes by speculating about how the co-affective potential of the folding of POVs through drone imagery might inform fieldwork and participatory processes from perspectives of care and empathy.

This paper elucidates how film may offer itself as a tool for both the representation and conception of space that can strengthen an alternative, phenomenological and transcendental position in architecture. Through an analysis of two films, it points to the medium of film as both a tool and an environment, based on Gernot Bohme’s ‘Raum leiblicher Anwesenheit (Bohme 2006). These films illustrate how the film’s picture frame becomes almost like a skin and through its surface and sound projects both a site and a near-sensual experience simultaneously. The medium of film as both tool and an environment thereby supports an extended sensory-intimate reflection on outer experiences and inner sensations that – in its audio-visual and time-space-based presentation – is close to a human experience. This transference and performance may lead to an extended awareness of touch, as the base for intensive projections of becoming and a new affective architecture.

Drone usage in fieldwork and participatory processes entails direct sensations that fold the pilot/planner and audience into one. Footage from drone filming entails direct kinesthetic and synesthetic effects that occur while one edits the film material, giving rise to affective responses. Through one experimental drone postproduction film, this article discusses how the interplay of vision, motion, and sound works as a set of gestures that comprise sensation as a (self- and co-) affection modus of immediation when one engages with moving images on-screen during drone filming, editing, and screening. The article builds upon Merleau-Ponty’s film writings and Puig de la Bellacasa’s touch/care perspectives. Specifically, it asks what constitutive aspects characterize the folding of the drone’s/pilot’s point of view (POV) in relation to the perceiver’s POV during postediting, and to the conceiver’s POV during subsequent viewings. The article’s original contribution is to show how affective experiences are transposed as haptic touch via the same images and folded POVs. It also addresses a research methodological perspective on filmic mediations and written accounts. The article concludes by speculating about how the co-affective potential of the folding of POVs through drone imagery might inform fieldwork and participatory processes from perspectives of care and empathy.

Drone usage in urban planning is increasing. When used in fieldwork, the dispatched drone returns moving images live on-screen, implying direct sensations for the pilot/planner. This article discusses how the human body is extended by the drone with its freely moving eyeline and its vertical and horizontal rhythms. Steering via on-screen moving images – moving oneself physically to follow the drone – has direct kinesthetic and synesthetic effects on the planner. The article examines how first- and third-person perspectives are folded together, and how the interplay of gestures (vision, rhythm, motion) is central to sensation during drone filming. Thus, the article identifies how the dispatched drone stirs affections, feelings, and touch during filming as a self-affective methodology and action. It defines distance as a felt rhythm of existence—a sensation, resonance, or immediation—that is mediated by the written account. The development of this methodological approach constitutes the article’s key contribution.

This article shows how the media of film can be
integrated, explored and can add value to architectural design studios
and practice. It elucidates how film may offer an alternative position
in architecture, where landscapes and cities are thought, planned
and developed in closer relation to their spatial and sensory effects
on humans. It underscores that the film camera can work as a kind
of amplifier of how we, with our bodies, perceive space and project
space. In the Landscape Film studio at the University of Copenhagen
the film medium was tested as a combined registration and design
tool for a new nature park south of Copenhagen. The final studio
films and designs show how resonating recordings of sound, time
and a bodily presence may simulate an Einfühling that inspires an
alternative architecture of relations: the ambient, the changeable
and the volatile. They also emphasize that an ability to work with
bodily experience in both physical space and abstract design
space is strengthened through the exploration of the film medium.
Film becomes a “resonance tool” or “membrane” for the perceiver
and conceiver, and contributes to a greater awareness of a bodily
preconsciousness in architecture.

This chapter elucidates how film may offer itself as ‘resonance tool’ for both representation and conception of space that can strengthen an alternative, phenomenological and haptic position of transcendence in architecture, a position from which landscapes and cities are thought, planned and developed in closer relation to their spatial and sensory effects on humans. It underscores that the film camera can work as a kind of amplifier of how we, with our bodies, perceive space and project space.
Through an analysis of first two works by the Austrian Filmmaker Johann Lurf and then three studio films the article points to the film media as a sensory amplifier and its ability to present a subject’s awareness of its bodily presence and a ”feeling into” space based on Gernot Böhme’s Den Raum leiblicher Anwesenheit (Böhme 2006) and Giuliana Bruno’s concept of resonance (Bruno 2014). How film and its sound – if being integrated as design studio tool – comes to amplify sensory dimensions. The studio films illustrate how the surface of the film´s picture frame almost become like a skin, and with its surface and sound, projecting both a site and near sensual experience, the film media reflects and projects a double perception. It supports a haptic reflection on both outer experiences and inner sensations that - in its audiovisual and time space-based presentation - is close to a human experience. Especially the parts humans often are not aware about. The sonic and ‘skin’ of the surface may leads to an extended awareness of a sense of touch, as the base for intensive projections of becoming.

Medium modulation is a key generative action in architectural practice and design education. Nevertheless, demands for sustainable solutions in design necessitate greater research attention to how thought is informed by experience and experimentation through sensory-aesthetic experiments, and how such kinaesthetic and synaesthetic impacts on imagination, consciousness and subjectivity-building can be taught. This presentation discusses experiential and experimental actions stirring relationships between students’ affects and sensations in-between space and visual forms of expression. Acquisition of such sensory-aesthetic design skills is explicitly aims to teach in the courses ‘Practice and Aesthetics in Landscape Architecture - Studio’ and ‘Landscape film – Studio’ at Copenhagen University, Landscape Architecture and Planning. Sensory-experience and experimentation assignments throughout the courses working specifically with the shifts between drawings, models, photographs and films form the experiential and reflective spine of the training for bachelor’s students and master’s students in shaping space for other humans’ sensory experiences.
https://conference.eclas.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ECLAS_UNISCAPE_Conference_2019_reader_ONLINE_full_size.pdf

This paper discusses if experience performances, as part of a multi-sensory approach, can support qualification of public spaces. Based on Participatory Experience Performances, such as sound and experience walks during Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017 and Inter-Noise 2016 in Hamburg done by the authors, this paper discusses the interrelationship between moving, listening and seeing, all equally important for experiencing and shaping the city. The paper suggests the concept of Participatory Experience Performances and discusses if such performances could
act as co-creative steps within the city making process. Finally, the promotion of embodied knowledge and language about human sensation and human-site interrelation, particularly in view of acoustically and visually differentiated spaces, which accentuates human becoming, is discussed as truly radical democratic and performative areas of action.

This paper argues that drone filming can substantiate our understanding of multisensorial experiences of quiet areas and urban landscapes. Contrary to the distanced gaze often associated with the drone, this paper discusses drone filming as an intimate performativity apparatus that can affect perception as a result of its interrelationships between motion, gaze, and sound. This paper uses four films, one of which is a drone flyover, to launch a discussion concerning a smooth and alluring gaze, a sliding gaze that penetrates landscapes, and site appearance. Films hold the capacity to project both a site and near-sensory experience. In so doing, films can achieve an intimate reflection of both outer experience and affection of inner sensations, and the audiovisual and time-space based presentation of this dualism can mimic human experience. This paper discusses how this embedded transference and transcendence can facilitate a deeper understanding of intimate sensations, substantiating their role in the future design and planning of urban landscapes. Hence, it addresses the ethics of an intimacy perspective (of drone filming) in the qualification of quiet areas.

This paper elucidates how film may offer itself as a tool for both the representation and conception of space that can strengthen an alternative , phenomenological and transcendental position in architecture. Through an analysis of two films, it points to the medium of film as both a tool and an environment, based on Gernot Böhme's 'Raum leiblicher Anwesenheit (Böh-me 2006). These films illustrate how the film's picture frame becomes almost like a skin and through its surface and sound projects both a site and a near-sensual experience simultaneously. The medium of film as both tool and an environment thereby supports an extended sensory-intimate reflection on outer experiences and inner sensations that – in its audiovisual and time-space-based presentation – is close to a human experience. This transference and performance may lead to an extended awareness of touch, as the base for intensive projections of becoming and a new affective architecture. The medium of film as a sensory transference tool of atmos-phere(s) In design and architecture, perception and conception often take place in an abstract space, where space is dealt with conceptually – a space or special spatial condition is mostly worked out without physically inhabiting it. Here, for example, an experience or a wish for a special atmosphere comes to express a (more) desirable state of space. How we engage with space bodily, both the physical and an abstract design space, is crucial for architectural practice. We need to work more critically with how bodily perception engages with and influences design processes. Our overall thesis is that bodily experience and knowledge – what Gernot Böhme (2006, p. 120) has described as a körperunabhängiger Raumerfahrung (space perception autonomous of the body) and the ability to perceive and project bodily sensations without being physical bodily present in space (Munck Petersen 2010, p. 200) – may be supported or strengthened in the design process by using film as a research and projection medium. The medium of film can increase an awareness of how space and the experience of space is defined by the bodily subject (Merleau-Ponty 2012) and confer the ability to experience bodily affect even while the viewer is not in a

‘Landscape Transformations’ presents a critical investigation of the relationship between landscape planning/landscape architecture, current paradigms for planning, politics and society, and generative practice.
More specifically, the dissertation, on this background, unfolds a new landscape planning and design paradigm, which focusses on spatiality and the role of bodily and sensory awareness in both physical and abstract/conceptual space. Through this arises a dynamic view of what landscape is and how to work dynamically with planning and design, rather than focussing on functionality alone. This view is dependent on what is called ‘spatial event,’ which again is dependent upon the mutuality between how physical space is perceived and documented, and then conceived and worked with conceptually through production of data, text, charts, diagrams, drawings and models. This work process can be designated as a ‘conception operation’.
Most current methods used in landscape and city planning in Denmark are based on a Modernist view, resulting in a rational approach to planning and design that ignores the totality of our embeddedness in the landscape. The dissertation therefore discusses the Modernist focus on function, visual physicality and landscape as object, which has given rise to planning methods that usually depend upon defining zones of function or value that do not recognize, allow for or constructively utilize any ambiguity or overlap. The dissertation also points out that the dichotomies between subject/object, city/landscape, and culture/nature, among others, are no longer valid.

Conception operations open the door for rethinking landscape planning as an open-ended, dynamic set of related processes because, in each step, the operation mediates one specific process to the next in a unique way.
Such varied processes, such as sensing and experiencing the physical landscape through bodily motion, documenting what is sensed and experienced, and bringing forth what is conceived, through the use of diagrams and models, and re-applying this to the landscape, involve transformations of information and media in order to gain insight in both specific and general principles for how to develop the physical landscape.     
The dissertation seeks also to strengthen the architect’s role in physical planning and in society by ‘opening up’ how the architect/planner works, both in relation to the architectural profession itself and in relation to other actors, she/he co-operates with. Through increased insight into the architect’s/planner’s conception operations, it will be possible not only to de-mystify the generative aspects of architecture, but also to underline its own identity as a reflexive and generative meeting with the world. 

To create a language about generative processes, theories from the fields of philosophy and art are introduced and their terminologies adapted and expanded. Philippe Boudon’s work with the space of conception and conception operations, Robert Smithsin's Non-site Theory, Charles Peirce’s and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s diagram transformations and diagrammatic thinking, and Gernot Böhme’s work on bodily presence all have made it possible to create an unambiguous vocabulary. 
By elucidating the characteristics of generative processes through an in-depth investigation of workflow, it becomes apparent that the architect/planner cannot be seen as separate from any step leading to the production of a new conception, design or strategy for new landscapes. A central focus is then the personal role as participant in the transformation of physical landscapes; we are part of the construction of the world, we are in, which makes us a part of what must be observed and investigated. In this perspective, working as an architect and planner means that it is meaningful to observe and reflect on how you work. Neither can the researcher be seen as separate from her/his work. The dissertation is, therefore, both interested in and characterised by an awareness of different scales and reflective processes, which relationally affect the dissertation’s course of action, structure and form.  The form of the dissertation mirrors the form and activities of the research project. Both the written and graphic style of the dissertation and research project seek to strengthen conception and promote a dynamic view and conduct. The relationship between fieldwork and theory and between research project and dissertation are during the research period investigated through diagrams as tools of thought and reflection and through an open, essayistical written style. Existing graphic material is analysed and new graphic material is
generated, analysed and reworked in the research project. 

The dissertation as a whole makes explicit a set of problems and potentials in relation to the construction of landscapes. A dynamic view of how a landscape is constituted and planned arises from a new understanding of the relationship between an enhanced awareness of the spatial and bodily effects of landscapes and an enhanced awareness of how this experience is worked with in both a physical space and an abstract conception space. The experience of sensing in a physical landscape is translated and transformed by bringing this sensory awareness over into abstract space by unfolding bodily presence in abstract space. It becomes evident, by working reflexively in abstract space, that an architect/planner uses a spectrum of methods, including physicality, executive and creative processes and self-observation, as a general way of establishing knowledge in working with space for other people’s bodily presence. In that sense, this dissertation contributes with a deeper understanding of the generative how in architecture by qualifying the generative momentum of conception, and thereby strengthening its role and position in planning processes and practise.

The dissertation also develops a new sliding scale of spatial parameters that can be put to use in any relevant framework, be it on a governmental, regional, municipal or adviser level. This system puts into perspective how landscape planning legislation can and must be inclusive of spatial and bodily parameters. The concept of architectural quality can likewise be reconsidered in such a way that the emphasis naturally is moved away from issues of taste. It is of utmost importance for both architectural quality and the development of sustainable landscapes that we feel that we belong there, are rooted by our bodily presence, and responsible. By bringing this new paradigm into play, the future design and planning of landscapes will truly create landscapes for living.

see here: https://static-curis.ku.dk/portal/files/253135563/Rikke_FilmInARchitecture.mp4


    Video lecture with Associate Professor Rikke Munck Petersen at the Section of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen on the use of films in the teaching of landscape architecture students at the master's and bachelor's level since 2014 and the benefits of capturing place-bound and sensory properties, film the medium as a tool in both site survey and proposal and thus design processes and knowledge production - fundamental in the creation of landscape architecture. Three films composed of student filmic works accompany the lecture.

See here:
Film explorations in landscape design teaching: MSc Film teaching, Landscape Film Studio: https://static-curis.ku.dk/portal/files/253136547/Film_medium_interchange_UCPH_FilmTeaching.mp4
Film as an intimacy projection, environment and design tool: BSc+MSc Film Teaching:
https://static-curis.ku.dk/portal/files/253136801/BSc_MSc_film_teaching.mp4
Filmic Master Thesis work: MSc Film teaching: https://static-curis.ku.dk/portal/files/253135652/Filmic_MSc_Thesis_work.mp4