Spatial Emergence
The ‘Spatial Emergence’ project, was an interactive multimedia CD-Rom. The digital work for ‘Spatial Emergence’ is the basis for the website structure. The premise was to focus on the transphysical city and document its residual spaces.
The research concept of the work ‘Spatial Emergence’ explores the significant spatial intervals between autonomous architectural structures. Its point of departure is Marinetti’s 1913 Manifesto, ‘…we should express the infinite smallness that surrounds us, the imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation of atoms, the Brownian movements, all the exciting hypotheses and all the domains explored by the high-powered microscope’. (NOVAK 1995)
The delay, lag time spaces or temporal breaks that lie between these autonomous structures are the principal metaphor for this expression. Through telecommunications, architectural infrastructures no longer need to remain in their present form. Indeed, my research suggests that the ability to renegotiate perspectival constraints is one of the most pressing tasks for art at this point in time.
The contextual importance of significant spaces are exposed by the re-evaluation referred to by Christine Boyer suggest that ‘Virilio’s city has lost its form’. (Boyer 1996 p 21) These marginalised spaces are left out of conventional accounts of the city. Or as Alan Davies and Nick Piombino put it in a different way
The lines composed of shorter and longer lines are the threads.
The places where they meet are the stitches.
Language is the needle.
Thought is the thread.
The cloth is experience.
The places where the stitches meet are memory, are history. (Piombino 1982 p 34)
The content of this quote when translated to the city could suggest that if one were to view the buildings within the city as words, then the street would be seen as a sentence. The pauses or spaces in between have equivalent if not greater value, because they give the sentence added meaning and create different inferences.
Boyer states,
It is curious that while CyberCities narrate the dematerialisation of physical space and chronological time, space has become a dominant issue with postmodern criticism. Edward Soja in Postmodern Geographies argues that the nineteenth-century’s affair with progress valued time over space, allowing the latter to hide things from us, to be used as a veil drawn over the surface. (Boyer 1996 p 18)
Ambiance
The research explored concepts of a sensorial understanding of space reinvestigating the origin of perspective. In the form of an installation based interactive work, it dealt with the interfaciality of database as space. This spatial interaction is investigated through the collision of immediate physicality upon the latent and continually shifting virtual physicality of the online database.
Ambiance was a work exploring the effects of an interface through the presentation of data on the imagination of space and location (identity and place). The work investigates the relationship between spatial paradigms created through databases and their effects on culture and power through the emergent technologies of today.
An installation-based interface and data engine has been produced to allow for real time compositing of virtual spaces, by interfacing with various forms of captured media.
The basic media building blocks of the work comprises documentation of various social spaces and their constituent components. This documentation was captured via a variety of media such as still digital photography, video and audio that was edited, catalogued and made web ready. This catalogued media was then placed inside an online database where each item is an element and linked via its spatial attributes. The online viewer or physical visitor can then pre-select an area of spatial investigation to construct a new presence in the world. The ongoing spatial narratives developed by the viewer through this project were to have been recorded and catalogued online as they were produced allowing for an insight into the development of social spaces via the mechanism of the work.
The work researches the effects of new technologies on the human interface in the imagination of space. The ability to access and form visual space allows the viewer to be confronted by a construction of his or her own pictorial spatial narrative.
Ambiantspace
Ambiantspace is a video work exploring the effects of emergent media on the imagination through the translucent layering of imagery. The work presents spatial paradigms as examples of significant spaces. Just as perspective changed our perception last century so new technologies are now reshaping our presence in the world.
The work documents a variety of residual spaces not as material representation of the new cyberspace but as significant symbols that have been composited to deconstruct traditional perspectival rhetoric. The work introduces a mimetic body that is created out of captured media fragments through a process of merging residual spaces. The ‘Ambiantspace’ project is not aimed at using the perspectival paradigm as a platform to present a new media image, or understanding of itself. Rather it proposes a new paradigm that allows for the possible objectifications of spatial reconfigurations of perception occurring with new technologies, which is the principle area of research in this project.
This work took part of the footage from Ambiance and reworked it into one hundred and twenty short video clips. Each one of these clips was related to a piece of text again from the Ambiance work. The one hundred and twenty video clips were then selected into twelve categories which I have called chapters. Each of the chapters lasts for 10 minutes so the whole work is two hours in length. I took the sound from the video, which I then mixed together in 5:1 Surround Sound to complement the experience of the space.
The sound for the each chapter had its own quality, which I have explored in their own right. I compressed the sounds so the work could also be placed on online and linked to the site Visiblespace. Again there are twelve chapters and the whole work lasts for two hours.
Residual sonic space
This sonic work is an extension of Ambiantspace and uses the sounds that were developed from the realtime recording of the spatial gaps between buildings. This sonic work attempts to bring the sound to the forefront by developing an animated linear abstract background for the emerging sounds. The sonic space develops from my early sonic works, and relates to my theoretical research on over-looked sonic implications in Brunelleschi’s device.