digitaldust

When I found out about this conference at the Kent Institute of Art & Design I got all sparky and excited, it had all the stuff I’m pursuing in my projects, lots of researchers, critics and artists all doing similar things. And I have to say I wasn’t disappointed. I got a lot out of the day but it was a real brain buster; 6 hours of critical theory… In her second sentence the organiser dropped in phenomenology and the long words and French philosophers didn’t let up till the late afternoon when we got to a couple of presentations of artist’s work.

Filming Erich Mendelsohn’s buildings.

They showed a work in progress cut of a video installation piece they have been doing on four of Mendelsohn’s buildings.

Mendelsohn apparently was preoccupied by the movement of people through his buildings so the artists have used their cameras to track the movement through the spaces using dollies, zoom and cameras spinning and arcing slowly. In all very sweet and gentle sequences.

Mendelsohn was also very aware of photography and its relationship to architecture. He was a photographer himself and had a book of his Manhattan shots published. He also was one of the instigators of architectural postcards as adverts for his practice. These post cards were apparently very popular in 20s-30s Germany.

Their constant question when they started the project and even now most of the way through is “How do you film a building?” Without making it either seem like a backdrop or end up with some kind of narrative, i.e. a documentary. How do you just capture it visually? This seemed to be a general theme through the day and a nice end point to the whole proceedings.

Their own blurb describes them as examining “the fusion of media and architecture through the production of emmersive bodyspace.”

The Evolving Oblique was an installation piece taken to Ars Technica as well as a couple of other media events I didnt catch. It was three loose hanging screens in a triangle with video back projections. The viewer would stand in the middle and a top down camera would be carrying out viusual motion tracking. So the viewers movements would control the video and the sound. The content of the videos were abstracted, digitised representations of Norfolk nature scenes.

The presentation was heavy on their philosophy, light on visuals.

They had this basic trinity of movement, media and architecture. These three concepts interlinked by interaction, space and embodiment.

It quickly became apparent that this talk wasnt particularly on topic and it did take an awfully long time not to come to many points at all. Mostly it was about portraiture and gaze.

He referred specifically to three images as examples. An Edward Hopper (yep the painter), a Nan Goldin and a Jeff Wall.

He riffed for about 45 minutes on the space in the image, the spaces described by the gaze of the subjects and the gaze of the viewer.

Roy’s talk was interesting. However he mostly raised questions rather than attempting to answer them. Probably a good thing in this critical realm. He did have some interesting imagery to illustrate his points. However he quickly left his title subject of Genius Loci and drifted around for the last half of his talk.

Genius Loci - Term coined and popularised by Alexander Pope (poet and landscape gardener) to refer to the personality of a well designed landscape. The phrase can also refer to the built environment.

Modern media leads to a wide range of framings and a wide dispersal, also fragmenting the recorded experience of a place leading to a fragmented and unclear Genius Loci.

Also Genius Loci may be more temporally than spatially located.

These days images of architecture are often seen well before the actual artefact is experienced.

Again we got on to who is the author of the work? The architect? The photographer? Editorial? Etc? Obviously it is a combination but where does the majority of the authorship reside? What is the balance?

He showed work by Andres Gursky, Matthias Hoch, Luisa Lambri, Christian Richters and referred to Catherine Yass, Heidi Specker and Frank Thiel.

Mark’s talk was all about fascist holiday camp architecture. Interesting historically and visually. These Collonia buildings are in all states from disused ruins to refurbished hotels.

The fascist state attempted to colonise the youth of italy.

Spaces designed for crowds, the mass. Very much at the forefront of modernist thought. How to order he masses.

Comrade - comes from the Spanish for room mate - Camerata.

Towers abound as places to speak from and symbols of power.

An interesting point about the totalising regime of graphic design. That it is trying to make all forms of communication “designed”

This concept of heterotopic flicker came up. Jumping in and out or between heterotopias.

This talk was the one I found to be most valuable and most in tune with where I’m going. His discussion around the utopian ideals of architectural photography are exactly what I’ve been grappling with for my end of year project (and from the looks of things probably longer).

Most of his talk revolved around Hisao Suzuki, the photographer for the Spanish El Croquis journal. But his background research is in architectural utopias.

Photography is the primary means of discourse in architecture. The text is secondary or in some publications banished entirely.

Photography specifies the use of architectural artifacts.

Photography was used as a modernist propoganda

Utopias are useful only as textural enquireis not as a basis for social change.

Architectural photography is the literal translation of utopia - “no place”

How do we distinguish between those who repeat the canonical formula from those who are mindful fo the genre, its limitations and its critics.

Moores Utopia - has disjuntions; breaks in its logic. Moore seemed to self aware of the impossibility of utopias and has put in these litterary disjunctions purposefully.

Suzuki puts himself, the almost constant companion figure of his editor and where possible the architects in the frame. The authors of the final image often appear as anonymous loiterers. This is reflective of the nature of multiple authorship in the final image. His work starts to take on aspects of environmental portraiture. (though my point was that there is little personality in many of his images… unless this is deliberate again)

Suzuki seems to highlight some aspects of the discourse but also his work strengthens the canon. The portraits hint at a self awareness but the images are still the typical eye candy.

Photography could and should be used to highlight the blindspots in architecture, not cover up for them.

Louise talked about a project that she and Magnum photographer Donovan Wylie carried out recently. This was to document the Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland before it is redeveloped. A book has been published aptly called The Maze.

She talked about its history in relationship to the war in NI and it’s political move from a conflict to a criminalisation phase. The prisoners in the Maze changed from being political prisoners to being treated as criminals. It seemed that over its history the prison swung from prisoner self-organisation through heavy handed official treatment and back to self-organisation.

Now the prison is in Limbo, it almost represents the limbo status that NI is in.

Architectures often form our most complete historical record of a past civilisation.

Wylie spent about 100 days at the prison. Working in the end entirely with 10×8. He spent most of the time initially getting to know the place. He derived a set of rules from the architecture and the ground plan and then shot ridgidly according to this. These rules determined his positions and framing.

He created 4 sequences of images. Three exteriors and only one of the cells. The other three work in from the outer walls, they are the steriles, the inertias and the roads.

Steriles and inertias are proper prison architectural terms for dead spaces between walls.

All traces of habitation has been deliberately but ineffectually effaced. But the architecture was a complete record.

Wylie attempts to overcome the biased sectarianism. Through the abstraction and aesthetic nature of his work, not focussing on the politics of the acts but on the space.

The images capture the detail, the austerity and the blankness of the place but the viewer can turn away unlike the incarcerated.

Foucault’s concept of Heterotopia was discussed on a lot of detail here. Heterotopia and utopias formed much of the basis for discussion for the rest of the day.

Overall I wonder whether heterotopia was a concept that was well founded by Foucault and/or if people are really straight about what it means. Ed Whittaker seemed to think he knew what it was but even after his talk many admitted to still being confused and even with a few questions not everyone grasped it. I think I understand what he was getting at but now, knowing what I know, I think it is a confused and at the very least not especially useful (if not downright wrong) concept.

Heterotopia - “other space”

Some stuff about irregular and illogical taxonomies. Foucault was inspired in his idea by Borges short fiction about animal classification - The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. (Reminds me of the folksonomies craze.) It’s all about evolved human classification not some kind of scientific order.

Mirrors, cemeteries, barracks, brothels, hotels and ships are all heterotopias. They are spaces one does not inhabit but passes through, they are shared, not owned. They are the perceived spaces not the physical.

Foucault never refers to specific buildings or spaces. (In fact from my later reading he doesn’t refer much to buildings at all.) Nor does he refer to photography though he does talk extensively about observation.

Photography as a structuralist sign not a metaphysical thing.

Heterotopias are constructed, nature is not heterotopic, but a garden is.

The panopticon comes up again. (I’m always surprised at the strength of this meme.) The change over time from physical inscription on the body for control and punishment to totalitarian control through observation and containment.

(I’m interested in this change to a single totalitarian observer from the social observation of the masses around you. My opinion is that individuals in society probably believe that the state is panoptical and controls and regulates lives, not society around you at the peer level. The imperfect panopticon leading to breaking the social rules, etc, not caring for those around you. Local control by social observation/control/boundaries. Syndicalism/tribalism.)

Archives of photography are the documentation of the “truth” of history. Writing and controlling the representation of history, in this case architectural.

Photography can be seen as a specialised technique of discourse.

The devious use of mirrored glass in corporate architecture borrows from the panopticon design.

Then he went on to show and talk about various photographers documenting or creating photographic heterotopias - Dan Graham, the Bechers, Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth.

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