GMU:Bits, Beats & Pieces/Sarah Pacheco Alvim/Babel (project documentation)

Babel

Context

Housing Crisis

The habitational deficit is defined as the number of houses necessary deal with the housing demand in a country. This includes parameters such as excessive rent value, precarious housing, and excessive densification. News from Caos Planejado compares data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and points out that in 2010, in São Paulo's metropolitan region, there were 651.701 empty buildings. During the same year, in the same region, the habitational deficit was estimated by João Pinheiro's Foundation as 596.232. An obvious outcome of this situation is the squatting of empty buildings. In May 2018 Brazil was shocked by the fire and consequent collapse of Edifício Wilton Paes Almeida, a building squatted by 372 people in the center of São Paulo. This ignited several discussions surrounding habitational crisis and living conditions. This situation reminded me of the Torre Palace case in Brasilia, when a squat was violently desoccupied by government orders. The operation used 2 helicopters, 200 policemen from BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, a unit of the Military Police trained to deal with urban warfare), rubber bullets and gas bombs, to evict 12 squatters, being 4 of them women and 4 children. Videos from both situations have been on my mind. Instigated by this, I researched situations related to the habitational deficit on other countries and found several unfortunately interesting (sometimes similar, sometimes very distinct) places and cases.

Babylon

In the Bible, Babylon is the city of the Babel tower. The story tells that the people were one and there was only one language on a certain time. People from this time decided to build a city and a tower, Babel's tower, and this tower was supposed to be so tall that it would reach the heavens. God, seeing this, mixes the speech of the people so they can no longer understand each other and scatter them around the world, and therefore obstructing the conclusion of the tower. Babylon is sometimes used to refer to a city or state of evil, sin, and caaos. It can also be noticed as a term in reggae and rap music/culture to define a society based on slavery, capitalism, and a system that seeks power, profit and individualism even by the cost of oppression and exploitation of people. "Babylon não cai, mata / Babylon doesn't collapse, it kills" - Síntese, Não Mais Problemas

Chosen Locations/Cases

Building/Cities

Edifício Wilton Paes de Almeida, São Paulo
Torre Palace, Brasília
Coffin Homes, Hong Kong
Migingo Island, Kenya/Uganda
Ponte City, Johannesburg
Robin Hood Gardens, London
Torre de David, Caracas

Concept

The concept is based on miscommunication. The foundation is the association between the squatting of tall buildings in urban areas (such as Edificio Wilton Paes de Almeida, Torre Palace, Ponte City, and David's Tower) and the story Babel's tower. The idea is to perceive these precarious living conditions as a consequence of living in a society with a "Babylonian system", having these abandoned and unutilized commercial buildings being irregularly used as living spaces by people that have no conditions to afford actual homes as a representation of Babel's Tower. The habitational deficit is a known and clear problem, there's an exchange, discussion and proposals on the subject, yet there seems to be no understanding on each side when it comes to who owns buildings/terrains and who needs them but cannot afford it. I seek to represent this miscommunication, this confusion of speech, the attempt to communicate (and while this intention is clear) but still having an unclear message and a dialog unabled by misunderstanding. I wanted to experiment this by mismatching medias, languages, buildings, situations and places, all related to the habitational crisis.

Approach / Implementation

The project was entirely done on Openframeworks, with no use of Pure Data. The videos, sound, and text were all taken from a selection of news, documentaries and videos from YouTube. Snippets from these recordings were made, the videos were separated from their sounds and text was generated with "Watson Speech to Text" from the sound of dialogues. These files were all named with numbers and put in a file, unassociated with each other (meaning a selected video clip does not necessarily have a soundtrack or text file that corresponds to that selected clip, and if it does, it is not grouped with it). With this library of different media, a fake documentary on the habitational deficit is made by mixing real documentation of real situations related to the theme. The code does this by superimposing a sequence of randomly selected video with a randomly selected soundtrack and a subtitled generated from a randomly selected text file.

Code

File:Src.zip Code attached. The code is organized with three different class files besides the "main.cpp" and "ofApp.cpp". Each class is dedicated to executing one form of media (video, text, and sound).

Small test version with only 4 videos and audios, to reduce file size, can be downloaded in the following link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F9ruEWU-midJNbKdddUEjPdpQODMbhc8/view?usp=sharing

Issues

Subtitle problem

I was unable to make an outline for the subtitle text and therefore decided to adopt a partly transparent black box underneath the text. This was inspired by youtube's subtitles and distances the traditional visual of movies and documentaries subtitles. I'm unsure if this is actually a problem or if it is actually more adequate to use youtube's aesthetics in this project, considering it is the source of all data collected and used. Anyhow the box is still a bit uncentered in the screen and sometimes the texts outgrow it because the estimating of the size of the box is made based on a font that has the same width for every letter, but the font used varies the width depending on the letter shown. I can't get the code to open, read and draw other .txt files line by line, it only works with one file.

Video scramble

It repeats too many videos instead of using all of the video options. The code should be edited so that it will not play a video that has already been played before all other videos have been played.