questioning interests

Why am I so interested in multiples? Who do I keep making books, which are a collection of individual pages? Why must a story be conveyed through parts, rather than one whole? What can multiplicity do that singularity cannot do? What about repetition? Does repetition strengthen sequence, and allow disorder to become evident from order?

Can space exist without time?
Can space exist without multiples?
Can time exist without multiples?

found subjects

Space and place serve as my content, and my subject matter. I document what I see, and re represent it. I am not specifically studying space, nor time, as much as using them to achieve other ends. I am using them as data, as subject matter, to study multiplicity and multidimensionality.

This semester I have worked on numerous short studies in trying to define these space/place inspirations. I have constructed several small books which utilize my photographs from the southwest. Signs, building materials, horizon landscapes all influence me. These moments—random, instances filtered through my interests and my perception— depended on what I happened to see. They now make up my subject matter. I gather information and edit/frame it in new forms. I don’t set out with too specific goals: yet, the photographs which I capture resonate with similarities. Shadows, close up fragments decontextualized form their original surroundings, landscapes of sunrises and sunsets. These isolated, blown up instances convey and capture the sense of place.

As a hunter and gatherer, I do not seek out specific inspiration. I utilize materials which I come cross, documenting and transcribing my my journeys through photographic means. I use materials which I find at the recycling center; I put things together that might not “fit." I like the balance of these juxtapositions.

The particular place is also almost incidental, as inspiration and source material can come out of anything. From route 66, I photographed signs and billboards, graphic buildings in the flat landscape. On the west side, I walked and photographed door frames and gas station numbers and created multiple compositions of materials and textures. Color and form, isolated moments link these studies, but these studies are less focuses on conveying something, as re-presenting, capturing, recording a place.

reconstructing flow

I am intrigued in the process of audio recording. It is an interesting way of getting my thoughts down. When I write, I write in fragments; I have been struggling this semester with taking notes, and distilling information. When I take notes, I start off by looking at words, looking at ideas, and then I branch out from there. I end up distilling the information down to a word, or a sentence, or even part of a word. I end up looking at the syllabuls of a word, and studying different broken up words that can then be put together into other segments and other juxtapositions.

I think that how I write is remarkable different than how I speak. It is telling of how I make sense of things. I think in fragments and I see in framing things. I am cutting things apart, when I am reinterpreting them I do not make coherent sentences. I think that the idea of construction of individual parts seems to happen naturally when I speak. When I write I have the same separation of image and text, it works well for photography might not work well for writing when I am trying to incorporate logical flow.

The idea of flow came up last week in Core Samples, the fact that this is a continuum in my projects. I am not interested in one specific moment in time, even though I am looking at moments, I am looking at the relationship between moving moments. Whether this looks like a still from a movie, but it still looks like part of a movie. It is meant to be seen in a sequence, or in a relationship with other stills. I am intrigued with that idea, that it is not using space as a moment. It is seeing seeing space through sequence, through time, through different intervals.

That is how you experience a building, You don’t stand in one spot, you are walking through a hallway or circulation spine you continuously changing your perspective and your experience is reframing the space in a new way. That is how architecture works, and sculpture works. Every direction is a different perspective and a reframing of the original subject. When you look at the 2D page everything is on the surface of the page. There might be depth on the surface it is still a flat medium. When you have a book, the format of the page the back of the page, the sequence of the pages. That front, back relationship is the equivalent of having the compressed foreground, middleground, background. Space is revealed out of the relationship between the parts. Space and time are always linked.

Looking at the definitions of time and space, they are related. Again, it is not about a moment it is about the continuum, and about multiple perspectives, multiplicity, multidimensional. That is where the time lapse come sin. I am not interested in time on its own. I am interested how progression and sequence play out over how you interpret a specific image or a room, or a space. It is really about the linking of those individual parts. I don’t get much out of one thing. I never show one thing in my reviews, and I don’t like working on one thing, one poster. This is why a book format is very similar to an architectural building. There is a sequence, you are building up the experience, whether it is a predetermined path (some books you have more variability in how pages are turned, maybe the pages are not bound together. That is probably why I am so interested in this format, as opposed to the poster format. As opposed to something that is a closed, singular system.

A camera is a system of framing. How can different systems of framing create a different reconstruction of a space?

dimensional space

When talking about space, whether it is looking at a case study or whether it is constructing it using a different media, I want to get into the reinterpretaion of 2D into 3D, or 3D into 2D and then back. I am constantly going beyond these shifting ground with the form of what I am making, as well as with the content of what I am expressing. These are important parts of what I am reinterpeting.
When I had to put a show together for Core samples, to show my work and my influence and inspiration, a lot of it could not be defined into specific categories. I view these things as being simultaenous. They are simultaneously 2D space or 3D space. they are not is either or, whether the influences are architecturual or Georgia O’Keefe paintings. They all have depth, compression of space, expansion of space, and dimensions. That is something that has been with my work always. I think pointing it out, and looking at different contexts, will reframe it and analyze it better.

defining space and place

I wanted to make some comments about today’s review with Hammett. I liked how he was telling me to look at space. As a camera sees space, or as a person sees space. He was giving me an example of movies, when a camera pans to a person or zooms to a person running, and the foreground, middle ground, and background are compressed due to the perspective of the camera and the angle, this compression is obviously a false interpretation of the distance between them. This is a very interesting way of looking at space. Congested space, expanding space, spaced that relates to perspective, point of view, relates to how that space is framed.

I am not sure which medium or which content I can apply this to. This is something I want to keep in mind.

Space and place are over used terms at this point. Looking at aspects of space, whether looking at specific places like vegas and documenting terms like “fast space” or “vast space” or any of these specific terminologies. I can define what about space I am trying to talk about.

documenting site

The diagraming of a site is familiar territory in architecture school. Before starting any project, and creating a form which responds to its context, a thorough site analysis is undertaken to document the range of activities, and typologies of usage present in a site. Building uses, congestions during parts of the day, important proximities, circulation routes: these diagrams give a quantitative analysis of a place. The space response to the space, and the building responds to the existing typology. The architecture transcend this analysis; the analysis is not the ends, it is a beginning step in the journey of creating a qualitative experience for its participant.

Understanding comes after documenting, but documenting is not enough to construct experience.

the 4th dimension

What is time? Is it the measured interval between events? Is it a continuum in which incidents occur? Is time immutable and irreversible? Is time the quantitative measure of a moment or an era? Is time a dimension? Is it all of these and more?

This is the course description for a Wintersession class called Timely Journeys. I am intrigued by how time is the 4th dimension, how to construct time without using a time based medium, and how to work with sequence and chronology to create connections between fragments.