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The twenty-first century was marked by emerging ways of space- and place-making. The architecture of the virtual environments of video games is one of the alternative practices in which the discipline of architecture got involved. This essay looks at the architecture and spatial storytelling in the videogame Stray (2022). The relevance of studying Stray does not lie only in the game’s enigmatic interiors, rigorous space-oriented narrative, unique patchwork of neon-soaked, post-apocalyptic labyrinthine spaces, or the cyberpunk Kowloon-like ghettoised urban environment in which the game takes place; Stray is an unprecedented case study as its gameplay is narrated through a non-human perspective: through the point of view of a cat accompanied by a small flying robot called B 12. This essay provides a critical review of the game and attempts to dissect how the spatial storytelling of its post/non-human architecture is orchestrated. Spatial puzzle mechanics, the fluctuation of the game between urban, architectural, and interior scales, and the role that platforms and vertical design techniques play are the subjects of the article. The challenges of the interaction of a game character with four legs with spatial elements, video game placemaking, and spatial design of fetch quests are other topics that the essay will look into. The article is supported by comments from an unpublished interview with Viv (one of the developers of the game) and a series of detailed analytical drawings from the reconstruction of the game environments by the authors.

This article offers insights for architectural and design educators that teach emerging cinematic and filmmaking practices. Due to its interdisciplinary nature and its practice-based methodology, this article presents the research, pedagogy and practice for educators in the field of architecture and spatial design as well as other creative disciplines such as film, animation and digital media. The argument is substantiated by empirical observations and qualitative analysis of student film-making projects and first-hand experiments in a design studio environment. Direct observations made from experiments in a design studio environment in which more than 50 students were trained and numerous internationally awarded architectural films and animations were produced. The research outcomes illus-trate how traditional orthographic drawing techniques can operate as highly useful instruments in the process of designing narrative pieces of digital media, animation and film about architectural projects. The pedagogical approach has the potential to have implications on the discourse, practice and pedagogy of the emerging common ground between architecture, spatial design principles, digital media and filmmaking.

The 1960 Italian film Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi Fratelli) is one of the greatest exemplars of Italian post-war cinema. The film depicts the disintegration and deterritorialization of an immigrant family from Lucania, a southern Italian village in Basilicata, and their relocation to Milan. The director of the film, Luchino Visconti, continuously alludes to the protagonist’s fascination with their hometown (paese). This nostalgic and wholesome image of paese contrasts the ubiquitous alienation and exploitation in the industrial North. The film is replete with signs and metaphors which explicitly and implicitly reinforce the evident tension between the immigrant family and an industrialized metropolis. Based on an interview with Mario Licari, Visconti’s assistant who accompanied him on location visits, this article offers an opportunity to revisit significant locations of the film such as Quartiere Fabio Filzi, the Alfa Romeo Factory, Milan Duomo, Ponte Della Ghisolfa, Parco Sempione, Stazione Centrale and Circolo Arci Bellezza. Underpinned by the theories of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Gramsci and Andre Bazin this essay creates a theoretical framework that works in parallel with a detailed analysis of the scenes, original archival material, dialogues, places, and history of architecture of the locations. The article demonstrates how urban and architectural spaces not only accommodated the narrative of the film but shaped, twisted and structured the story of the masterpiece. The paper shows how Visconti succeeded in visualizing a ‘hidden’ Milan that was never appeared on the silver screen before Rocco and His Brothers.

With the dawn of moving images, architects started to develop an interest in studying and utilizing film for theorizing, critiquing and representing architecture. In recent years, a myriad of books and academic papers by architectural theorists have been published around the strong relationship between architecture and film. Simultaneously, leading architecture schools established subjects concerning the two interlocking arts, some academics dedicated their research career to studying the relationship between film and architecture, post-graduate degrees on film and architecture were devised and architects and architecture students have been involved in a significant trend toward creating architectural animations and film. However, despite the advances of digital filming and editing and its availability to the public, sophisticated technologies of lighting, modeling, simulation and texturing in CGI programs used by architecture students, architectural films and animations commonly present certain shared symptoms such as fast and disturbing camera movements, aimless editing, weak compositions and narrative-less montages. These symptoms reveal an unfortunate truth that architects still do not know how to use the moving images effectively, and this knowledge has yet to be successfully transferred to the discipline of architecture. This dissertation traces the roots of this challenge and tackles it in a series of research activities. This thesis proposes a toolbox named the ‘film-architecture matrix’ that can be used as a matrix of film design and analysis. Within the thesis, this film-architecture matrix is employed as an analytical tool in three chapters. The dissertation puts forward a pedagogical framework for teaching filmmaking to architects and utilizes the film-architecture matrix as the main design generator. In addition, this dissertation takes on the task of presenting and critically examining the two filmmakers, Bela Tarr and Theo Angelopoulos to architectura

The size of web-graph created from crawling the web is an issue for every search engine. The amount of data gathered by web crawlers makes it impossible to load the web-graph into memory which increases the number of I/O operations. Compression can help reduce run-time of web-graph processing algorithms. We introduce a new algorithm for compressing the link structure of the web graph by grouping similar pages together and building a smaller representation of the graph. The resulted graph has far less edges than the original and the similarity between adjacency lists of nodes is increased dramatically which makes it more suitable for graph compression algorithms. The characteristics of the resulted graph are similar to the original. We also ensure fast decompression of the compressed graph. Partial decompression of the web-graph is also possible. The result of the precompression can be loaded into memory and the increased similarity between adjacency nodes makes it suitable for further use of compression and web-algorithms.

BACKGROUND: The dung-inhabiting ascomycete fungus Podospora anserina is a model used to study various aspects of eukaryotic and fungal biology, such as ageing, prions and sexual development.RESULTS: We present a 10X draft sequence of P. anserina genome, linked to the sequences of a large expressed sequence tag collection. Similar to higher eukaryotes, the P. anserina transcription/splicing machinery generates numerous non-conventional transcripts. Comparison of the P. anserina genome and orthologous gene set with the one of its close relatives, Neurospora crassa, shows that synteny is poorly conserved, the main result of evolution being gene shuffling in the same chromosome. The P. anserina genome contains fewer repeated sequences and has evolved new genes by duplication since its separation from N. crassa, despite the presence of the repeat induced point mutation mechanism that mutates duplicated sequences. We also provide evidence that frequent gene loss took place in the lineages leading to P. anserina and N. crassa. P. anserina contains a large and highly specialized set of genes involved in utilization of natural carbon sources commonly found in its natural biotope. It includes genes potentially involved in lignin degradation and efficient cellulose breakdown.CONCLUSION: The features of the P. anserina genome indicate a highly dynamic evolution since the divergence of P. anserina and N. crassa, leading to the ability of the former to use specific complex carbon sources that match its needs in its natural biotope.