 Hello, thank you for having tuned into Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture and we're broadcasting live here and after that YouTube forever from our oceanic capital city of Honolulu, Hawaii. And as the nature of the show is architecture and architecture is usually considered to be connected with land and Hawaiians here call the land the Aina and they mean this literally and figuratively and comprehensively. So in these days we might have forgotten a little bit about what surrounds us and why I said the capital, the world's capital is that we're surrounded by the most water masses in the world. So we're the most remote place from motherland masses but we're the most in most water. And so we want to reflect on what surrounds us and how this could have a relationship to architecture. In order to do so we're going to bring in an expert and she has placed herself strategically in the middle of all the land mass and we're broadcasting live to St. Louis, Missouri. And it's 10 p.m. there now so we're five hours time difference. And who's going to be our guest and educate us about the oceanic and the sea is an architect and a graphic artist and a scholar and last but not at all least an educator. And her name is Alisa Kim. Alisa, thank you for being with us on the show. Hi Martin, thank you for having me. Good to have you and we met a little while ago when you were visiting us and gave a fantastic presentation that ever since resonates with me whenever I'm in touch with the water which I'm basically every day and I prepare myself for the show today with my daily diving and swimming and I went under the water and you as if it was meant to be the weather was clear down there and I had a view of the things you're going to talk about. But this is your show so please tell us and we're going to bring in picture number one for that to share with us why you're so connected to water and I'm going to start off and share one thing that you're both of us are genetically connected to water. Me in Germany we have the North Sea and your ancestry is Korean, right? But what we see is not Korea. So where is that and what does it have to do with your very strong from my point of view very unique connectivity to the oceanic in your very sort of poetically pragmatic and pragmatically poetic way. So where do you come from? Well, so the image that you see there is of the Sutro baths which are in San Francisco which is where I spent a lot of time as a kid and grew up in that area and I really like that image because I think for me it configures both this sort of idea of containment but also of escape which I think our ideas that we often project onto the space of the ocean and what I'm really interested in is trying to understand how we can think about a relationship between culture and nature that's maybe a little bit different than what we typically think of in the sense that we we tend to draw lines between those two entities and I'm kind of interested in understanding how we can actually blur those lines. Yeah and this is a fantastic opening statement because this is what happened to us here in Hawaii that we look at water almost like a commodification a commodity where it's whenever we built real estate on the land water is so the backdrop it's about views and it's about prime coastal property and real estate and looking at the water and having it as you know background for for postcards but that's that's sort of this surfacial view of the ocean and you have a very substantial view of the ocean and when you were just saying drawing a line I made me smile because your means and methods are actually drawing lines in a very fascinating way and we're gonna bring in number two picture number two which is your way of illustrating how actually we're conventionally looking at the oceans and the sea right yeah exactly it's I mean I think anybody can kind of relate to that image as the sort of typical political map of the world but what I think is interesting is that that's still the way that we tend to draw the ocean so the ocean in that image is really represented by this gridded space which is one way of thinking about it as a mathematical space which then can also be extrapolated as a sort of abstract space in that sense it's as if the ocean sort of disappears and it's really this sort of named and terrestrial bodies that are emerging out of that sort of flat yeah fascinating and the true scholar you are you did your your research your precedent study research how we always encourage your students to do it they're very binging in to say the best ideas you know are probably not the ones you come up with but there have been other ones pioneers in the area so you found another female researcher who did some pioneering work in that and gets us to the next picture you want to talk about her please yeah so Marie is actually kind of one of the figures that inspired a lot of the work that I've been doing she was actually the first cartographer to draw the ocean floor and to map the ocean floor and this was during the Cold War where it was sort of in the national interest in terms of security and defense to understand the topography of the floor and as a woman she wasn't actually allowed to participate in any of the expeditions so she was back in the labs in Columbia really translating a lot of the sonar data that was coming from the expedition ships into these kind of beautiful hand-rendered drawings mm-hmm well it's great you give her justice and rehabilitate her reminds me of the recent movie about the black women behind shooting people to the moon right so finally it all comes out that there's a lot of women power behind all that the great things so talking about progression and evolution of that research 20 years later is the next beautiful drawing here explained to us what that is yeah so that's essentially a sectional diet diagram of the ocean it starts to talk about the delineation of the ocean after the UN convention on the law of the sea which is the framework that starts to give jurisdiction to different sovereign states and really just kind of tries to start to organize the space of the oceans a little bit more through legislature mm-hmm yeah that's that's amazing because these are you make something invisible visible right because when when I swim in the morning on a very small scale you know I don't I don't see what I see is the natural boundaries where the reef is and where the reef ends you know that I see and I can feel but these are sort of invisible I mean they're human you said before the show terrestrial markings Ryan right and so so let's go to number five which where it where it starts that use of in your beautiful diagrammatic way make clear to us how things are so this is a what we call a figure of ground illustration what does it show yeah so typically we're used to an architecture drawing the buildings as the sort of black space or figure and here I'm trying to reverse that so I'm really trying to draw the ocean as the figure as opposed to the void but it's still in this image kind of devoid of any additional information so in some ways it's very similar to the political map that we showed an image to where we're really kind of just understanding the flat sort of surface the ocean yeah and the next picture is subtitled with a beautiful name that I will do my best not to mispronounce that's baby metric what is baby metric is the word but it's a bathymetric atlas of the sea and essentially so here what I'm trying to do is and kind of going back to some of Marie Tharp's drawings to really draw the topography of the ocean floor beneath the water and again really kind of trying to blur some of the boundaries between what we would consider to be land and what we would consider to be water and so here you kind of see a smoother more fluid transition between those two bodies mm-hmm and the next two pictures are zoomed in right and in certain cultural jurisdictional kind of zones and and this is also the background picture that that studio choose and color coded a little bit more but these are really sort of carefully crafted and and you know in your capacity of both an architect and a graphic artist sort of really tools for for comprehending the the otherwise invisible and if we go to number nine this again gets us back to to zone I mean we call this zoning right on land and how do you call that on water and what are these well so what you see there are a hundred and seventy seven new sovereign claims so it's essentially a hundred and seventy seven claims to territory under the surface of the ocean and and kind of along the ocean floor it's essentially the first new sort of land grab by multiple countries that we've seen in in kind of modern time mm-hmm at that particular scale mm-hmm so it traditionally also in education in practice we call this diagramming right you really bring out certain aspects of of a thing by emphasizing it through particular focus on certain lines and volumes and shapes and so the next one number 10 is is once again demonstrating something very graphically compelling and and intriguing that is so something very it's a very soft illustration for a very hard thing which has to do with money right yeah so that slide you're looking at the exclusive economic zones and those are essentially those were delineated in the original convention on the law of the sea so they basically say that along any nation's coast 200 nautical miles out from that coast remains the jurisdiction of that particular country mm-hmm and so I guess what makes the the sort of diagrams from the previous slide really important is that this is the first time that we're essentially claiming other parts of the ocean and and the reason that this was actually sort of allowed to happen was for the purpose of exploitation of natural resources and once mm-hmm so this is really sort of an imperialist map right exactly conquering which we're very familiar to here in Hawaii and so go go back to this interesting term that you bring in which is claims because that has to do once again with the next slide as well number 11 yeah so what you see on that slide are just kind of zooming in on three of the particular claims mm-hmm but if you can imagine you know I think it's it's interesting especially today when there's been so much focus in the public realm on this idea of kind of securing our borders and whether our borders are really protected from immigration or not to then kind of step back and realize that our borders actually extend far beyond what we can see kind of with our own eyes and that are our sort of countries take on a much different shape than we're accustomed to I think is particularly interesting mm-hmm super fascinating at this point when it take a chance to take a one-minute commercial break promotional break for our colleagues show and then we're going to be back with Elisa Kim's exciting narrative about the oceanic so see you in a minute you're watching think tech Hawaii which streams live on think tech Hawaii dot com uploads to YouTube dot com and broadcasts on cable OC 16 and O'lell 54 great content for Hawaii from think tech Aloha I'm Richard Emery I'm with co-host Jane Sugimura of condo insider Hawaii's weekly show about association living the purpose of these videos is to educate board members and condo residents about issues relating to association living we hope they're helpful and that they assist in resolving problems that affect the relationship between boards and their residents each week Thursday at 3 p.m. we bring you exciting guests industry experts who for free will share their advice about how to make your association a better place to live and answer a lot of very interesting questions Aloha we hope you'll tune in so we're back to Elisa Kim's oceanic realm and we've been talking about borders as a very unfortunate current issue in the world these days and so the the next beautiful diagram number 12 is dedicated to that right yeah so that that drawing collapses the new claims that I was talking about with the sort of current geopolitical map and so it's really kind of thought of as a as a new atlas in 2016 and the next one gets us a little bit more maybe to architectural I mean not saying that this is not architectural but this is especially intriguing and also want to point out to my dear friend and mentor Chris Ford who is a strong advocate of iddic images and composite drawings and take a chance to say how again how beautifully crafted these things are in a truly modern sense because you can extract all this information that you know used to build them up but could you also look at them in just a way of composition and find them really wonderfully balanced and composed and crafted and the background between this picture here when we were talking before reminds me of my childhood proximity to the to the coast because in northern Germany where I'm from we have a national park it's called Wattenmeer and that's where the sea over half of a day retracts so you can actually walk on the bottom of the sea for hours and then you got it we talked about that certain landscapes sort of temporarily appear their preals which are little rivers that's these are the ones where the water goes out as the last and comes back in as the first so I have some connectivity to that and so you once again we're illustrating that and analyzing that with your fascinating tool so let us know what and it's once again introducing an intriguing word and term that's hydrographia hopefully I got that set yeah so there hydro is from the Greek water and graphia is also from the Greek it means writing so I was thinking about this as a sort of type of water writing and a sort of communicative mapping that tries to both collapse the new territories and bathymetric contours of the ocean floor with an additional temporal dimension that's really inherent to the materiality of and perhaps the sort of events that only occur at the surface of the ocean so a lot of those lines that you see and the and the kind of stifling actually relied on a real-time collection of data where I was tracking vessels and other sort of floating populations to hint at a sort of not just the top or the bottom surface of the ocean but this idea that it's a sort of volumetric space mm-hmm so it's a form it's a three-dimensional form right that's sort of you know you can't comprehend it traditionally and conventionally right so you got to go through this sort of intellectual twist in your mind that this drawing is sort of a vehicle for right and and and along these lines the next one is is titled the ocean inside out this is actually pushing us to an even more extreme right yeah so these are actually inspired by some drawings from the 1600s that depicted the world without water and they they the globes kind of looked like they shriveled up raisins and so I wanted to sort of try to reverse our normalized perceptions of the sea by you know depicting the oceans not as voids but actually as figures mm-hmm here I've kind of extruded the space of the ocean out so you can see the oceans sort of emerging from the sort of void of the land mm-hmm mm-hmm yeah I mean the closest we get here is that you know when we explain Mauna Kea to people we say it's actually the largest mountain in the world if you measure it from the bottom of the ocean right and just from the above the water line it's not there are the ones who are taller so so that's the closest we get to it but then usually we don't think further so you for these compelling sort of you know gymnastics of of of thinking about it make us really see that so when I was introducing you in these different capacities and being an graphic artist and an architect and obviously this being your scholarly work but you pass this on to the to the next emerging generation in your role as as an educator and I have to say that the school you're at right now is is Washington University and it's one of the most prestigious schools in the country and we have someone that relates us that's Robert McCarty so I will say hi to Robert he's one of my mentors and so we will send him a link to the show so so yeah again share with us now in the remaining time in the show how you get students excited about your methodology and how they apply that to to the discipline of and to architecture so the next picture is 16 please so yeah these this was a studio that I actually co-taught with Igor Marjanovic who's the chair of the undergraduate program at Wash U and it took place in Florence Italy we were there with the students for eight weeks and we asked the students to envision a possible tenth island there are nine islands in the Tuscan Archipelago and we asked them to envision a transient space for world immigrants in Florence the sort of migrant crisis is really apparent and I think it's something that the students aren't able to necessarily avoid and so we wanted them to start to think about space through the eyes of some migrants and I should say that it's you know I think we think of these projects as academic exercises potentially more as rhetorical devices to bring some of these important issues to the fore rather than to kind of think of this as a literal solution to a problem problem solving you mean that versus problem near problem solving right they're really vehicles for thinking yeah and and again they if we get the next picture here your this is a perfect demonstration out of the textbook for what Chris Ford calls the IDD dimension obviously also a composite drawing which is carefully crafted and built up with data so you don't come from the artistic approach you come from a scientific approach data-based fact based and then basically built this built this up built the argument up and built the drawing up right is that fair to describe sort of the way of working yeah you know I think so this project the students name is Aria and she was really inspired by the sort of political undertones surrounding race and gender that function to sort of disrupt a migrants journey for freedom for a better life and so she actually used you can see in the image she used imagery from photographer Carrie May Weems who has a self-portrait series in which she confronts and disrupts famous European architectural iconography by inserting herself in places where black bodies have historically been excluded from and so Aria wanted to really make visible the experience of women along migrant routes which is also often invisible you were obviously looking ahead of time because by the time you did this which was a little while ago right things hadn't escalated on a national international stage as much as we have it now right so this is really timely timely matter right yeah I mean this actually we this was just this past summer I would say maybe in the midst of of the sort of escalation of all that yeah so the next picture here project yeah so this is the second part of Aria's project so the same student and she actually was researching some of the personal stories of the women migrants and she learned that actually the women felt much more vulnerable when they were inside of a refugee camp as opposed to kind of in transit and so it inspired her to develop or sort of envision the island as a transient home for women and children as they await asylum she used as a sort of tectonic or as a sort of material and structural logic the idea of the veil which many of the women spoke of as being something that they felt protected while wearing and it's a very ephemeral approach right it's a very reluse approach it's a very area approach why and so it's not about containing and confinement you know and causing more stress is about releasing that stress right and mitigating which is you know very important so number next picture second to last is is once again the great ability to zoom in and out so that one was really zooming in into the architectural fabric literally and figuratively speaking but we're going to number 19 you're going to zoom out again and have a more macro approach yeah so this is a project by a student named Lele who really kind of was taking stock of the stories that were being reported on of the sort of deaths that were occurring in the Mediterranean Sea and so this first image is a drawing where she's kind of really trying to understand the scale of what was happening yeah yeah and once again beautifully crafted while we show the last picture we're running out of time so we probably don't have time to go into detail but I want to sort of conclude and phase out in in thinking you for educating us and giving us sort of inspiration about our very specific place here in Hawaii where you know people having lived here before having been discovered were I I believe allowed myself to say and who am I I'm a Holly I'm not from here but I feel that they must have been thinking about this not very differently in a way that they try to understand things intellectually but also were very much sort of intuitively connected to things and we're trying to to match the two together and blend it and there are some of the artifacts of navigating with you know with sticks and bones and things like that all very you know you know pragmatical and research tools but at the same time also inherently poetic in their nature of not having been designed superficially surfacially but really kind of substantially so I think needless to say we need you here so hopefully we can get you here at some point in one way or another and thanks for that little appetizer which is much appreciated and well thank you for staying up so late back in the heartland and thank you for having me it was a pleasure thanks for enlightening us