Anne West dictation

Anne:
You talk initially about the study of place and space from multiple perspectives. And, what it means, also, to be moving through different picture planes, different dimensions, spatial dimensions. And in the early work, especially with the Holga camera, they are these parallel but dimensional spaces that for me move in between a myopic perspective into something that renders into clarity. There is something stereoscopic that played dimensionally into the work.
The circumstances that you find yourself in are part of the freshness of the work. You feel like you are constantly traveling through spaces. And, then with your camera lens capturing the dynamic of these shifting perceptions.

What I am wondering still is, how significant is the sense of place to your work? Or, was that simply the way in which you were able to develop a body of images? Or even in terms of your overall thesis inquiry? What is at the core—at the center—of this work?

Is it trying to create a more varied spatial construction? Or, helping us to understand that perception depends on optical distances?

I brought two things: writing about “Architecture as a Materialized Idea”—particularly speaking about the work of Frank Gehry. I can’t help but this that this concern is also very highly functional in the way that you construct space. That was one thing. The Marcel book was the other.

(shows the Marcel Breuder book, page by page)

In all of these dimensional pieces, you are building a narrative that it is never accessed from one point of view, the way in which the compression is actually like these different facets of perception. What I love about this, is that he takes you into the illusory space, and you become deeply immersed in the material . You know that you are in a fiction, and that at the same time, you are also emotionally captive, and then your realize you are thrown back out. And that you are thrown back out, and that this is all part of the artist’s contrivance. There is something in both of these essays that resonated with the way in which you are trying to work. The fictive space is very much a construction that you are launching us within, you want it to have a very significant emotional charge.

Agnes:
I am looking at how architects build space, and now I am building space not with actual space, but reconstructing something that exists and constructing the emotion of space. This is an intuitive thing I have been doing, and now I am looking at all my work and it is there. It is what I am most interested in. Even I feel like I have not experienced it until I photographed it. It is not the real image, but reconstructing into my own thing, and I find that interesting. How I frame it becomes important, I have to work on, that book has a distinct beginning, middle, end, still not a defined , nice pacing, that is how people understand what he is saying. If you put out images for people, how I read the paces, how I am intrigued by the photographs, I looking into them more, if I didn’t frame it correctly, people are not going to do that. The image shows maybe too many possible points of entry, that people don’t know where to enter.

You might want to think about, what are the points of entry? And, they do give you access to what it is that you so intently want to communicate about these sites. A way of breaking down the structure. So, I know that you did a lot of work with this Holga camera. A way of creating the double picture plane, the realistic take, I find myself getting to be more representational, it is not a minute detail that is blown up. That it is real. You understand what this is. The camera itself changes it.

Why don’t we look at some of the ways you know that you construct space.

Well, one way is the double picture plane. I’m becoming more conscious of it. Taking what I have learned with this camera, but gone beyond the camera. I don’t want to be limited by the camera. I have hard time doing something with these. They are very finished.

These are ongoing experiments. This double picture plane was what you understood something. Were able to achieve something that was important to you. Can you articulate that very clearly? In a page spread. You don’t have to go on at great length, you can be selective about the examples you cite. That is one way.

There are these layers of sight, layers of accessibility to it. I feel like I am seeing behind the eyes of myopia. The other is that things come into view. What does it mean to be to be straddling a place through those two lens distances?

It freezes the time where normally you walk that distance, you shift your head, this is from a state like walking with the camera. I am going forward but the camera has a fixed lens. I have to walk through 15 minutes or walk closer and that action on my part documents the space in motion.

What strikes me there, is the trying to actually navigate a space and negotiate multiple faces.
They all look like they are floating. You are not even sure where the horizon line is. There is a timelessness to them. They take on an aspective fantasy as well as actuality. Maybe they open up the possibility for you to imagine your way as you travel through it. Inded you are constructing a mapless space of a placeless place.

Have you looked at Deleuze’s writings on striated space? Comes out of the notion of space that is felt, through material and compression. I’m wondering if there is a way that the materiality of architecture is a materialize idea. Read that for some of its language. All becomes extremely textured. Some of it is almost diaphanous, a rich pigmentation.

You do these works with painting, this felt so much like what was happening in the book. He is constructing a story. There might be ways you can use that to your benefit. Kind of contemplate it.

Do you know the work of Sonja Delenay? The painter? It feels like “orphism." There is something about this cubist construction that is also apparent in these works. So, maybe, you can try to find language to use, and it may be that this will help you find language to talk about what you are doing. You seem to be drawn to it.

Now that you have enough techniques in your belt, you can begin to construct. This begins to read as tessellation. Do you know Escher drawings—where space is continuous? One things flows into another, leads to another. It is a continuously building space. We can call it visual tiling. It is all means of constructing different planes of images.

Across time and within time. There is a different time construct here. You are traversing time s well as entering time.

I never thought about that. I do put things next to each other to have things across time. This is a real, physical “within time” with scales. That clarifies the Holga pictures. Walking around and walking closer. You walks across the room, and then walk closer, and I see that relationship. It is different from how someone photographs the room. That is not the room itself, that is a static moment.

So, what do you then bring to communication? What’s your view? What makes this worth experiencing?

I’ve been thinking about that recently. What determines some of the places I pick. Why those places are significant? They are somewhat happenstance situations. They are not planned destinations. Then I started re-thinking the idea. Most of my work is not about a set goal, or about a set destination. It is about discovering things along the way. Not necessarily a journey—as in the typical hero’s journey—but more about the circulation and the path. I look at the path as the in between/transitional moment using a place like the commuter rail or highway pictures.

Do you think you are trying to expose infrastructure?

Somewhat, maybe. But the film is more about noticing, capturing, and documenting places that people take for granted in their lives. For example, filming the commute rail was a deliberate decision. I was drawn to find things that are moving. I did not want to film people. Landscapes, in and of themselves are not moving, which makes them kind of boring. I then thought about what makes a landscape interesting: having a different perspective, out the window into a moving horizon, framed the experience in a new way. And the fact that I filmed the commuter rail and not a famous train journey was deliberate as well. When people saw it, they had a whole new notion of that commuter rail, and began seeing it as a moment which they are not even paying attention to. They are going to work. They are thinking about other things. I framed the situation for them to become aware of it.

Life is not about the destination; it is not a predetermined, structured narrative. Days are constructed out of insignificant moments which we don’t always pay attention to. To call attention to these moments, I want to re-frame certain spaces that I have gone through numerous times: the time spent driving between Los Angeles and San Francisco, time spent on the commuter rail to work, time spent rollerblading on the East Bay bike path. It is kind of an infrastructure. It is the time where you are neither here nor there, and you don’t pay attention to where you are. That is what I want people to notice. Most of their time is spent going somewhere, but neither being here nor there. I want to bring those moments to attention and to build “ante rooms:” thresholds of transition and reflection. The work becomes a portal for viewing those moments, existing simultaneously between perception and conception. It does not communicate a verbal message, but a pictorial experience. In this constructed threshold, the external space is juxtaposed against the internal frame of mind, creating a moment of respite to facilitate observation.

(play film)

I initially became interested in taking shots straight out the window, then I started thinking about filming more than the horizontal landscape, to juxtapose the inside of the train against the passing scenery. I started framing the internal and external space, studying it over and over again. The sequence was trying to speed up and slow down the space. I was more focused on editing the picture to the sound, rather than constructing a story. It extended the playing with the conventions of film, questioning the nature and timing of the sequences.

I kept going back to the commuter rail, filming it three times a week for four weeks. The structured study made me aware of what I was seeing. When I showed the film, it also allowed others to notice what they never saw there.

The sound, the pace of the music all make me aware that there is some urgency—that you are getting somewhere or that you are going somewhere. It’s relentless. I feel like there should be a time index here to state how long the film is running. The film keeps moving even though the train actually stops. Does the train stop?

It does, but this ride is over 10 minutes. So, for this segment between Providence and South Attleborro, it does not stop. For all of my films, I was filming the same segment between Providence and South Attleborro. I would get off after one stop and getback on a traingoing back the other direction. I do think the sound is too overbearing. Too much. It helped me pace the visuals, but, now that it’s edited, I could switch out the sound. Hammett thought it sounded like a grid structure/column structure. It is there, and if you remove it, and put something else in it, you still have the pacing left.

There isn’t much interpretation that goes with them. They exist as they are. You don’t use those as a basis for building something out of them. I almost can see that these could be cash register reels, long strips. You can almost see these taking the shape of something that you actually unroll, unwind. And, that, becomes another form of the book. Book as a long journey. For one of my projects, I use this adding machine tape. I cut it and tell people to take a thought and go for a long walk with one thought in their mind. See how that thought develops. It seems like this is a thought space. Your work is a thought space. So, I am wondering if using the way in which if you wove the text into them, you could change what would happen to our understanding of our own mental place.

What if these were billboards on a highway. How can I see these in a new context, so that I see them a new. What they provoke?

I don’t want to cut it up into pages, I like the continuum. I even scanned them as strips, I label them as strips, I have a set way to put them on a continuous roll, I do not want to make pages of them.

I see a gigantic poster, a panorama, so maybe it invokes a different form, and that some of the forms that might be appropriate to this? Are you scrolling through the world? I like the notion of tiling. Things are tiled over time. Maybe they read as some kind of projection of information, that is continuous?

(Anne reads architecture article)

I feel on some level you don’t want to touch it. Maybe on some level the construction can allow you a more dynamic reading that informs. Where space and sight/site inform the context reading the land. It invokes an action on your part. Where literally, some parts are not visible, or clear, and others come into clarity. And, so what if you were to take even some quotation that is important to you and work it through this field. What would happen to it? Almost, like the train passing through.

I like the idea of something going through.

And, then keep going through. But because of the facets, you will keep reading the information differently.

I agree.

I would use the train as your driving intensity that is pick up information as it goes through the landscape. It becomes the functional metaphor of your thesis. What’s core is this notion that you are traversing landscapes, you are always passing through, but what you say, “Even as I pass through, I am picking up all this different information, somehow even despite the speed, I am able to make some sense of a journey.”

It makes me understand more of what I do because I am interested in them. I like the idea of traversing the landscape, and having a train as a metaphor. I want to be moving, and walking, and seeing. This conversation is a new way of framing all of this.

Think of Verita. He attached the camera to him. He talks about this constant moving eye as a documentarian. Maybe you are doing a different kind of documentary work here.

Yeah, but I do not want to just be relying on the camera and on the technique. (Pulls out photos for Lucy’s class) These are not in any order. For Lucy’s class we had to go out and do something in the landscape. I brought two pieces of mirror, and became more interested in the visual phenomenon constructed out of two picture planes. Originally, I brought four. I limited myself to two planes, and investigated how I re-saw things and reconstructed them. I picked the part of the bike path I always rollerblade through, and I decided to stop. This is an exciting new direction where I can consciously think about and deliberately control the construction of something, through a very simple mechanism.

You are very interested in the construction of the space. And ways to re-perceive it. There is a certain trajectory you are on. You are wanting to construct optical opportunities for you to engage these sites in these newly constructed montages. You are really working the picture plane, if you will, in the same way that Picasso did, or that Braque did. You are trying to study where perception behaves differently, when it involves the mind, what the mind does, as opposed to what we are experiencing. Your go through these constructions, so that overturn the patterned view. It’s no longer a “real” representation, it’s all about invoking or re-seeing. Maybe you are trying to extend vision.

What is most frustrating is that when someone is looking at the photos, they are not seeing what I am seeing. I like the idea of weaving something through, so that they can look into it the way I look into it. Maybe I can add something that is changing the perspective, and is transforming it through perspective. I used to look at a lot of Braque’s still lifes, and learn how he fragments the picture plane in such a way that it has an internal logic and makes my eye see the juxtapositions.

You are trying to invoke those juxtapositions. You are constantly moving. Your work really explores optical illusion, playing with what is the foreground and transforming that. Your eyes are constantly moving. The picture space tricks its viewer, as the idea of the perspective is different. Your eye does not really trick you, you know what’s really there. Because you are shifting perspectives on us, we can’t stabilize our sight.

I’ve done things with black and white, playing with what happens when the black and the white change places, when you no longer think what’s in the front, or what’s in the back.

So, it has to do with the way you are reconceiving the picture plane. You might draw your language from orphism, or from cubism, or from tiling tesselation. In these ways, you challenge our conventions of moving through space. You build in transparent self-reflectives. You start to see yourself in the situation, which is different than holding a comfortable objective distance. That’s where the real experience of the architecture is. You are angling our vision. You are rethinking the boundaries of experience.

This project really played with the idea that I was there and I saw this, and now you are only seeing these photos, which are my framed viewpoints about the original experience. All of these points your brought up, it’s all there. I have a hard time decided what I want to do , what’s the main idea.

Basically your gestures are that you are building different constructions. These are all optical devices—a camera, a mirror—devises that render an experience of landscape. In reconstructing the sense of a visual field you are rethinking the graphic plane. Some of it is informed by architecture, some of it is informed by working with the Holga camera, so of it is informed by very specific material studies. You say you find yourself along this certain trajectory, and that is the constant, that is the force, that is rolling this, a way in which all your images are propelled by this movement along this path. It’s what happening peripherally, or through a glimpses, this peripheral frame, that is bringing you inspiration What you are trying to do, is to weave or collapse these different angles of vision into a structure that can either be communicated two dimensionally or through time based media. Essentially, you want us to read something out of the visuals you are reconstructing. This becomes an interesting project. You’ve got the same visual principals of tiling, optical shifts, vision shifts, that now ask us to be read. I ask, what’s being communicated, and where would I encounter this. It was an effective piece. Mesmerizing, like the train piece. You are in a frame of time, multiple things are occurring, but you are entranced by materiality of the place, by the shifts of light.

I think they need a context. What I want people to do is a table of contents, a road map. If I was to look at your work, I would introduce it in a multifaceted piece: learning from architecture, reading space, the next chapter has to do with rethinking perspective, and the Holga camera, and then what it means to construct space as a design practice. Then, where does the text show up? You can construct visual space, what happens when textual elements come through?