PROJECT SPACE - A NON-KNOWING ARCHIVE (35mm slide and audio) OCTOBER 2014

 

This work was a minimal phenomenological archive of the WCA project space exploring ideas surrounding place (Edward Casey's The Fate of Place), Foucault's functionalism (Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison) and the shift from place to site. It was a deliberate minimal view of place in terms of rejecting the colour/temperature and texture of place which is required for true experience in phenomenological terms. The piece highlighted the challenge between trying to interpret place without trying to calculate it. PROJECT SPACE was aimed at giving the participant (listener/viewer) a real-time alternative view of the working project space. It took the form of nine 35mm slide compositions of the project space, a slide-viewer and an audio track (on loop) to be listened to via headphones. The sound piece explored what is calculable and non-calculable in our experience of place. The idea that the volume of a container (the project space) could be experienced, or rather calculated, through the echos of a ball being bounced around the project space on a previous occasion and then experienced (aurally) during the exhibition.

 

PROJECT SPACE was being exhibited as part of the MFA year 1 first group exhibition which was transforming the WCA project space into a gallery setting. The work was therefore attempting to deconstruct this 'site' element of the space and portray a novel and hopefully previously unknown aspect, which probably would not have been experienced before and certainly not be experienced knowingly during the exhibition. The layered images were to represent a view of the space not immediately overt and were to be selected by the user and placed into the slide-viewer manually. The idea was then that the users would experience the images according to the previous user's selection creating an interaction in experience.

 

It was the first exploration into creating a mixed media interactive phenomenological archive. It was also a subtle introduction to immersive art on a microscale. Problems lay in its end-user understanding in terms of how the work would be experienced – this was not entirely clear and was probably too subtle in its clarity/overall meaning regarding how it should be approached and experienced (physically). At this point my research question had veered very much toward theory and research surrounding 'place' at the cost of human experience and awareness. From a practical viewpoint I feel that I worked well with the constraints of the project space adapting to work with the light conditions in the absence of darkness to present the slides.