Notes for Project 002 (V)

Each face of the cube is a double side screen. From inside the architectural space (Ra), the representation of the spatial mapping of the individual’s performance is projected to the faces. From outside the architectural space, the representation of the idea of urban environment (Rb), the idea of the everyday life in a city, is projected. The result is the superimposition of two realities in each face of the cube, which represents an architectural space.
Twelve projectors (P) are attached to the cube. The camera is set inside the cube. The position of the camera is variable.
Diagrams

1. and 2.

About Notations (II)

“Anticipation: (...) notation's more radical possibility lies in the possibility of proposing alternative realities. (...) “directed indeterminacy”: proposals that are robust and specific enough to sustain change over time, yet open enough to support multiple interpretations.
Invisible: (...) includes the phenomenological effects of light, shadow, and transparency; (...) - and perhaps more significantly - program, event, and social space.
Time: (...) Interval, duration, and tempo, acceleration and accumulation are the key variables in a notational schema.” (From ‘Practice architecture, technique and representation’, Mapping the unmappable: on notation- Glossary: working definitions, by Stan Allen, page 41 and 42)

About Notations (I)

“Notations are necessarily reductive and abstract, yet the products of notation do not necessarily resemble the notation itself.” (From ‘Practice architecture, technique and representation’, Mapping the unmappable: on notation, by Stan Allen, page 32)

About experimental composers, the example of John Cage and Notes for Project 002 (IV)

“Numerous experimental composers closely linked to the group of painters known as the New York School formalised their activity during the 1950s and 1960s. This group of musicians, including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, used musical notation and music scores in order to create a new context for sound. They based the structure of their pieces on rhythm, sounds and silences. For these musicians, the score was like a canvas or a presentation surface's "framework", and their creative activity was a way of returning liberty to music. In John Cage's words, they were trying to "free sound from music". In his piece 4'33'', Cage went even further by composing a piece that was free of sounds; in other words, a "frame" built around emptiness. Since the radical activity of these composers, music has ceased to be composed as points on a line and has begun to exist in a multidimensional sonic space, breaking down the barriers between art and life, abandoning intentionality and accepting indetermination.”

http://www.macba.es/controller.php?p_action=show_page&pagina_id=28&inst_id=24704&lang=ENG

Notes for the individual’s performance and the city’s motion pictures:
Incorporate the idea of pathbreaking deployment of chance and indetermination.

About pictures

“(...) it is more likely that their (pictures) inexhaustible mystery arises from the fact that they externalize an aspect of perception, or that they appear to externalize it, as if one were seeing the thought itself (...). I see it as a head despite the absence of these verifiers and conclude, recklessly and irresistibly, that in doing so I must surely be seeing it as Vermeer did, perhaps on the screen of a camera obscura, perhaps looking straight at a woman, and I am exalted at the thought that I see through his eyes as well as mine.” (From 'The Projective Cast', Conclusion – The Projective Cast– The Arrested Image, by Robin Evans, page 357 )

Notes for Project 002 (III)

The elements of geometry are imaginary. Their mental constructability enables us to make use of their certainty outside the mind.

“Since architecture is made with geometry, architecture should provide an evacuated sample of imaginary construction.” (From 'The Projective Cast', Conclusion – The Projective Cast, by Robin Evans, page 354)

Mental construction is unlimited.

The Projective Cast, Robin Evans

“(...) William Ivins described why he believed that space was created by hand: “Tactually, things exist in a series of heres in space, but where there are no things, space, even though ‘empty,’ continues to exist, because the exploring hand knows that it is in space even when it is in contact with nothing.” (...) Moreover, the soft, variously sensitive surfaces of the human body considered as a haptic organ stretched judgments of metric equivalence into anamorphoses.” (From 'The Projective Cast', Conclusion – The Projective Cast, by Robin Evans, page 352)

About the cubist's attitude and Notes for Project 002 (II)

“All acts of violence are illegible during performance. It can never be entirely clear whether they are preliminaries to construction or acts of spleen intent only on disfiguration.” (From ‘The Projective Cast’, Chapter Two - Persistent Breakage, by Robin Evans, page 62)

Notes for the representation of the spatial mapping:
List of what it is not intended to use: Multiple orthographic projections; Descriptive geometry; Superimposed axonometric projections; Coherent, regulated method of representation or graphic description; Analogy with technical drawing; Mathematical rigor.
It is intended to use a suggestive, intuitive representation in the service of aesthetic aims rather than practical ones. The spatial mapping will be immeasurable.

About the absence of presence and the presence of absence

“(...) while Eisenman was discoursing on the absence of presence and the presence of absence, a member of the audience, thinking it time to leave, stepped in front of the projector, his expanded shadow eclipsing the image of the slide for a few well-chosen moments, thus illustrating the absence of presence and the presence of absence in wonderfully concrete terms. Since it was made without words or writing it could be proposed as the most telling critique to date. The rest of the audience certainly rated it thus, though more for its explicitness than its intellectual content.”(From ‘Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays’, Not to be Used for Wrapping Purposes: A Review of the Exhibition of Peter Eisenman’s Fin d’Ou T Hou S, by Robin Evans, page 120)

Tests, Project 002 - Reality1

Tests of the mapping representation of the individual’s position within the room. It shows the possibilities of using a camera, keying, a 3D room and animated lines in AE. (00:00:20 and 00:00:03; low resolution).

About Cognitive Mapping

"(...) the term cognitive map is theoretically akin to other terms describing the structure of memories such as semantic network, mental lexicon, or number fact retrieval table. There are some properties that are particular to the information in the cognitive map, for instance spatial primitives such as distance relations between events (Golledge, 1995). Nevertheless, because it is the product of normal memorial processes, researches assume that the cognitive map is derived from associative, sequential, or configural memories."
From Gary L. Allen, "Human Spatial Memory".

Notes for Project 002 (I)

The idea of individuals within a built environment and their relationship is complex. This project tries to explain the individuals' uncertain situation of living in and being part of a city. It does so by showing an individual's actions through two different realities.

Descriptions:

- Individual: he represents anyone from a western society; he is anonymous; he needs to escape from a reality that he can't control; he needs to reassure his position over a reality he thinks he can control.

- Reality1: it is an enclosed space, sealed, neutral, basic; it is represented as a white cube (room); it is a refuge, an escape from an outside reality.

- Reality2: it is a city, a place where the individual loses his control over it, he feels lost, confused, he has fears, frustrations, etc.; its spatial perception is through the representation of the light emitted from the movement/flux/energies of people, vehicles, machines, etc. (anything that performs an activity within the city); this representation visualizes an architecture.

Story:

An individual is in a room (Reality1); he has the necessity to measure and analyse continuously and repetitively the space and his position in relation to it. He thinks he has control over this reality, he knows where he is.

Slowly the room loses its spatial references, the lines that define the space start disappearing: edges, corners,... (but as long as there is one corner left the individual can still control where he is in relation to the initial space). Eventually the last corner disappears and he finds himself in an infinite white space.

He starts walking in a direction, hoping to find a 'place'.

...

Notes for Reality2: the individual has the impression of having been there before (introduction of cognitive mapping of spacial memories); he believes he belongs there, he is part of a larger scheme...

Project 002 will be developing Reality1.

About Fred Sandback

"(...) In wanting to create sculpture that did not have an inside, he found through this seemingly "casual act" the means to "assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it". (...) In his exploration of physical relationships via the incorporeal rather than through concrete matter—via the interplay of vacancy and volume— he recognizes that the illusory and the factual are inextricably intertwined. "Fact and illusion are equivalents," he asserts; "Trying to weed one out in favor of the other is dealing with an incomplete situation." (Sandback, quoted in 74 Front Street, p. 4.)."

http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/introduction/95

Revolving Upside Down, Bruce Nauman

"I wanted the tension of waiting for something to happen, and then you should just get drawn into the rhythm of the thing. There's a passage in Beckett's Molloy about transferring stones from one place to another, in the pockets of an overcoat, without getting them mixed up. It's elaborate without any point." (Bruce Nauman)
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?REVOLVINGU

Notes from a Recent Arrival, Lucy R. Lippard

"(...) J.B. Jackson hols up the possibility of a landscape that would 'provide us with some symbols of permanent values ... landmarks to reassure us that we are not rootless individuals without identity of place, but are part of a larger scheme'."

From Lucy R. Lippard, "Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby".

Postmodernism and the City, Frederic Jameson

"(...) there has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore – like many of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding remarks – stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions."

From Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The cultural logic of late capitalism”.

Project 001

First exercise of the programme. Themes: obsession/compulsion/addiction etc. (00:01:00 ; low resolution).