More on Shadows
In his essay In Praise of Shadows Japanese novelist Tanizaki writes about the conflict between western and eastern aesthetics in the modern world. He says that Japanese 'find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.' He emphasizes beauty in subtlety and that which cannot be seen too clearly, leaving some of the experience to our imagination. Pallasmaa talks of something similar when he emphasizes the importance and intimacy of darkness.
Post-Traumatic Urbanism
Cities like Mumbai and Beirut have developed in unstable uncertainty and in many ways are resilient survivors. They have adapted with 'redundant networks' and 'diversity and distribution' rather than 'centralized efficiency' which makes them flexible in the face of shocks to infrastructure (Lahoud, 2010).
Dayanita Singh
I am especially interested in her attempts to express her own visions of a place or city, opposing the singular story people usually expect about India, that of 'sensational catastrophes and human failures'
Collaboration: The Third Hand
Through collaboration the singular voice of the artist is muted or dispersed, it is a break away from a singular artistic identity. The author introduces the idea of a 'third hand,' or ghost artist which is an elusive other or combined identity created in collaborative works. This third independent existence is in itself 'uncanny' because such a constructed ghost identity 'blurs the distinction between the real and phantasmic.'
Site-Specific Art
In his book Eyes of the Skin, Pallasmaa talks at great length about the beauty of human perception and how the senses interact with each other to form experience. He emphasizes the importance of a sense experience as a whole. He says there is a bias to the eye in the architectural practice because people are focussed on how a building looks rather than how a body can move within it or how it feels. When it comes to the perception of places he discusses the importance of emotion, memory, imagination and fantasy.
Group Critique 3
Other mentionable works where the audience completes the piece are Tall Ships by Gary Hill and Anthony McCall's work with light.
The Heard and Unheard
'By constructing an "architectural music-space...made possible by the microphone," Music While We Work explores how artistic practice can intervence in the social space of labor production at the intersection of history and everyday life.'
Place-Making
Notes on urban memory, place-making and its relation to the interpretation of the city in contemporary art and architecture.
Personal Bibliography
A complete alphabetical list of relevant books, articles, websites, film, video, exhibition, journals and lectures referenced in Phase 1 of the MA Interactive Media course.
Research Methods: Phase 1
A detailed look at the theoretical framework and research methods behind my practice in Phase 1. Key issues discussed are practice as research, the post-digital age, heterotopia, qualitative research methods, and limitations of these methods.
