Architectural League Proposal
I drive. The road horizon seldom varies, and the freeway rarely turns. Four hundred miles to Los Angeles. I drive south, and watch the gradually evolving landscape fly by the window. It is mesmerizing in its mundaness. There is nothing there; yet, I am enchanted. This collection of moments along a fixed route transforms and evolves. I stare and drive.
Much has been written about driving. Driving along empty stretches of roads, along fields, and through cities. The tilled fields and the tiled rooftops resemble each other in the patterns they construct for the moving eye. But what about those non-scenic by-ways? Those unnoticed “un-landmarks” in a city? What about the gridlock of a traffic jam? What about the congested suburban boulevards, streets with non-descript wood frame construction? What about the commuter rail—the time spent going to work in the same train, at the same time, everyday? What is scenic about these non-scenic places?
Turning the vehicle into a new vantage point, I realize that the world is not moving. I am moving in the world, as Vertov’s mechanical eye. With my methodology of working, I am in the site, moving and documenting. Here space and time are codependent and interactive.
The subjects depend on circumstances of discovery: the changing perspectives of constantly traveling through spaces. The discovered images are propelled forward by my movement along a trajectory path. What is happening peripherally—through short glimpses in the peripheral frame— brings me inspiration. With a driving intensity to pick up information as it traverses circumstantial landscapes, my constantly moving eye documents all that it sees. With the ever-present camera lens, I capture the dynamic of these shifting perceptions, not only analyzing but responding. By walking along these sidewalks, and driving along these freeways I become the narrator and the translator for these circulation paths. I experience them, and make them into other experiences.
BACKGROUND The photographic image becomes a transformation of its surroundings a translation of the original context. But, the Holga camera was not exactly the beginning. USC Architecture school was. Documentation, transformation, and construction are the means I have been working with since I started my architectural education nine years ago. Looking at the world around me—and responding to the existing context—were approaches I investigated time and again. In school, I learned about the importance of surroundings and the nature of space and place in buildings and landscape projects. I discovered how people navigate buildings, how they intuitively react to their surroundings, and how they are influenced by the places they inhabit.
The vocabulary of discussion and evaluation of my work stems from the architectural studio. I have realized that I do not have to utilize concrete or drafting tools to build space. I have continued to build using photographic setups, exhibitions, and interactive books as the methods of achieving spatial construction. The means have changed, but the process is similar and the goals are the same.
GOALS During the past year and a half, I have been intensely focused on constructing multidimensional space in the realm of graphic design, as part of my graduate mfa thesis. I have documented various places and created new visual narratives for my translations and transformations. Instead of building with walls, I have started building with images.
Although I will officially finish my studies in June, I have realized that this is the beginning not the end. At RISD, I had the opportunity to start many interesting projects which I did not get the chance to further experiment with. I took a 16mm film course this winter in which I learned how to use the camera and manually edit film. I spent six weeks riding the commuter rail between Boston and Providence, filming this “non-place” with a 16mm Bolex camera. I tried to understand the routine and the space, by revisiting the same place again and again. I captured it in fragmented snapshots. The beauty and timelessness of the black and white film inspired me to further pursue this medium in my translations of landscapes.
I am interested in constructing a “mise-en-scene” of American roads and “non-places,” a visual travel log of overlooked horizons, focusing on the journey and not the destination. I propose capturing the timeless places on the old Route 66, while heading west and pausing to study the nondescript landscapes outside the passenger window that are usually just vague blurs at 70 miles per hour.
I am applying for the Deborah J. Norden travel grant to be able to pursue making a 16mm film in the context of my cross country drive from Rhode Island to my home in California. I will plan my trip around places that are not tourist destinations but rather “unseen” landscapes. I sped through these places on my way to graduate school three years ago. Filming while driving towards the southwest will allow me to slow down and appreciate the beauty of the western desolate towns. In fact, I plan on filming mostly while driving, to create a moving landscape. (Of course, I will not be the one doing the actual driving, as holding a twenty pound camera while staring out the window is not advisable. I have already coerced a willing assistant to come along to allow me the luxury of the passenger seat.)
Documenting and transforming these sites will allow me to reinterpret them for others. I hope to help others become aware of these places. Through framing and reconstructing the scenery, I hope to alter their perceptions. To raise an awareness to the beauty of the overlooked, to the power of emotionally connecting with a place, and to the power of re-framing and re-seeing the mundane is my goal. If awarded this grant, I plan on using some of the funds to create an exhibition/installation with photographic posters as well as to edit a final short film for the use of the Architectural League.
CONTENT The subject matter of the proposed travel will involve noticing, capturing, and documenting places that people take for granted in their lives. These places will be selected and framed in a manner that estranges them from the familiar.
Why are those places significant? I believe that life is not about the destination, it is about the journey. 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. These are the spaces where you are neither here nor there, and you don’t pay attention to where you are. I want to bring those moments to attention and to build “ante rooms:” thresholds of transition and reflection. My work will become a portal for viewing those moments, existing simultaneously between perception and conception. In this constructed threshold, the external space is juxtaposed against the internal frame of mind, creating a moment of respite to facilitate observation.
I consider the previously mentioned project about the commuter rail a case study for my proposed film. It helped me to understand the “non-place” subject matter. I filmed a space which is both an exterior place as well as an interior environment. You sit inside the cabin, immobile, staring outside at the moving landscape. It is also a place where people spend countless hours, but hardly think about that particular threshold of experience or time spent. I am not attempting to romanticize trains, but they intrigue me as places which allow mobility and movement. They transport their inhabitants away from one place to arrive in another. This transition and transportation—the change through various environments, slow or fast—is an interesting threshold. Here space is compressed, as the exterior landscape moves and people stand still.
Highway 5 is also an in between place, an artery linking San Francisco and Los Angeles dotted with fast food chains and gas station convenience stores. These are places of transition, as well as standstill. People are moving through them but the places hardly change. America is full of such in-between places.
There is interest in the mundane, the overlooked, and the taken for granted. We experience space through this normal routine, this uneventful sequence of events, or of events. As E.V. Walter wrote in Placeways, “We recognize different kinds of place change. The same place does not remain the same. No city is what it used to be. Yet, despite great changes, some places continue to make sense.”
Perhaps, this is why I kept being drawn back to the commuter rail. It is a space that at once does not change, but also changes constantly. It is a place of fast time and slow time, of exterior and interior space. It is a place you don’t think about, but you frequent it everyday. It is not a destination, nor a real journey. It is a place of opposite dualities coexisting simultaneously.
CONCLUSION Traversing space as well as entering space, my mfa thesis inquiry at the Rhode Island School of Design delves into the study of place from multiple perspective representations. I am weaving different angles of vision into a structure that will be communicated two dimensionally. The work visually translates the act of moving through different picture planes and different spatial dimensions.
Using different optical devices to build new constructions—such as toy cameras that create double exposed photographic negatives or a 16mm film camera— I create an illusory space, a fiction based on real decontextualized spaces, that compresses different places and different times across and within one picture plane. The timelessness of the work takes on an aspective fantasy as well as actuality. The fictive space is a construction that I am launching the viewers within. These external spaces of perception and internal spaces of reflection undergo perpetual reconstruction.
The optical opportunities allow viewers to engage with these sites. I ask the viewers to recalibrate their own lenses and consider the ways in which perception and expectation determine how they see as well as what they see.
Much has been written about driving. Driving along empty stretches of roads, along fields, and through cities. The tilled fields and the tiled rooftops resemble each other in the patterns they construct for the moving eye. But what about those non-scenic by-ways? Those unnoticed “un-landmarks” in a city? What about the gridlock of a traffic jam? What about the congested suburban boulevards, streets with non-descript wood frame construction? What about the commuter rail—the time spent going to work in the same train, at the same time, everyday? What is scenic about these non-scenic places?
Turning the vehicle into a new vantage point, I realize that the world is not moving. I am moving in the world, as Vertov’s mechanical eye. With my methodology of working, I am in the site, moving and documenting. Here space and time are codependent and interactive.
The subjects depend on circumstances of discovery: the changing perspectives of constantly traveling through spaces. The discovered images are propelled forward by my movement along a trajectory path. What is happening peripherally—through short glimpses in the peripheral frame— brings me inspiration. With a driving intensity to pick up information as it traverses circumstantial landscapes, my constantly moving eye documents all that it sees. With the ever-present camera lens, I capture the dynamic of these shifting perceptions, not only analyzing but responding. By walking along these sidewalks, and driving along these freeways I become the narrator and the translator for these circulation paths. I experience them, and make them into other experiences.
BACKGROUND The photographic image becomes a transformation of its surroundings a translation of the original context. But, the Holga camera was not exactly the beginning. USC Architecture school was. Documentation, transformation, and construction are the means I have been working with since I started my architectural education nine years ago. Looking at the world around me—and responding to the existing context—were approaches I investigated time and again. In school, I learned about the importance of surroundings and the nature of space and place in buildings and landscape projects. I discovered how people navigate buildings, how they intuitively react to their surroundings, and how they are influenced by the places they inhabit.
The vocabulary of discussion and evaluation of my work stems from the architectural studio. I have realized that I do not have to utilize concrete or drafting tools to build space. I have continued to build using photographic setups, exhibitions, and interactive books as the methods of achieving spatial construction. The means have changed, but the process is similar and the goals are the same.
GOALS During the past year and a half, I have been intensely focused on constructing multidimensional space in the realm of graphic design, as part of my graduate mfa thesis. I have documented various places and created new visual narratives for my translations and transformations. Instead of building with walls, I have started building with images.
Although I will officially finish my studies in June, I have realized that this is the beginning not the end. At RISD, I had the opportunity to start many interesting projects which I did not get the chance to further experiment with. I took a 16mm film course this winter in which I learned how to use the camera and manually edit film. I spent six weeks riding the commuter rail between Boston and Providence, filming this “non-place” with a 16mm Bolex camera. I tried to understand the routine and the space, by revisiting the same place again and again. I captured it in fragmented snapshots. The beauty and timelessness of the black and white film inspired me to further pursue this medium in my translations of landscapes.
I am interested in constructing a “mise-en-scene” of American roads and “non-places,” a visual travel log of overlooked horizons, focusing on the journey and not the destination. I propose capturing the timeless places on the old Route 66, while heading west and pausing to study the nondescript landscapes outside the passenger window that are usually just vague blurs at 70 miles per hour.
I am applying for the Deborah J. Norden travel grant to be able to pursue making a 16mm film in the context of my cross country drive from Rhode Island to my home in California. I will plan my trip around places that are not tourist destinations but rather “unseen” landscapes. I sped through these places on my way to graduate school three years ago. Filming while driving towards the southwest will allow me to slow down and appreciate the beauty of the western desolate towns. In fact, I plan on filming mostly while driving, to create a moving landscape. (Of course, I will not be the one doing the actual driving, as holding a twenty pound camera while staring out the window is not advisable. I have already coerced a willing assistant to come along to allow me the luxury of the passenger seat.)
Documenting and transforming these sites will allow me to reinterpret them for others. I hope to help others become aware of these places. Through framing and reconstructing the scenery, I hope to alter their perceptions. To raise an awareness to the beauty of the overlooked, to the power of emotionally connecting with a place, and to the power of re-framing and re-seeing the mundane is my goal. If awarded this grant, I plan on using some of the funds to create an exhibition/installation with photographic posters as well as to edit a final short film for the use of the Architectural League.
CONTENT The subject matter of the proposed travel will involve noticing, capturing, and documenting places that people take for granted in their lives. These places will be selected and framed in a manner that estranges them from the familiar.
Why are those places significant? I believe that life is not about the destination, it is about the journey. 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. These are the spaces where you are neither here nor there, and you don’t pay attention to where you are. I want to bring those moments to attention and to build “ante rooms:” thresholds of transition and reflection. My work will become a portal for viewing those moments, existing simultaneously between perception and conception. In this constructed threshold, the external space is juxtaposed against the internal frame of mind, creating a moment of respite to facilitate observation.
I consider the previously mentioned project about the commuter rail a case study for my proposed film. It helped me to understand the “non-place” subject matter. I filmed a space which is both an exterior place as well as an interior environment. You sit inside the cabin, immobile, staring outside at the moving landscape. It is also a place where people spend countless hours, but hardly think about that particular threshold of experience or time spent. I am not attempting to romanticize trains, but they intrigue me as places which allow mobility and movement. They transport their inhabitants away from one place to arrive in another. This transition and transportation—the change through various environments, slow or fast—is an interesting threshold. Here space is compressed, as the exterior landscape moves and people stand still.
Highway 5 is also an in between place, an artery linking San Francisco and Los Angeles dotted with fast food chains and gas station convenience stores. These are places of transition, as well as standstill. People are moving through them but the places hardly change. America is full of such in-between places.
There is interest in the mundane, the overlooked, and the taken for granted. We experience space through this normal routine, this uneventful sequence of events, or of events. As E.V. Walter wrote in Placeways, “We recognize different kinds of place change. The same place does not remain the same. No city is what it used to be. Yet, despite great changes, some places continue to make sense.”
Perhaps, this is why I kept being drawn back to the commuter rail. It is a space that at once does not change, but also changes constantly. It is a place of fast time and slow time, of exterior and interior space. It is a place you don’t think about, but you frequent it everyday. It is not a destination, nor a real journey. It is a place of opposite dualities coexisting simultaneously.
CONCLUSION Traversing space as well as entering space, my mfa thesis inquiry at the Rhode Island School of Design delves into the study of place from multiple perspective representations. I am weaving different angles of vision into a structure that will be communicated two dimensionally. The work visually translates the act of moving through different picture planes and different spatial dimensions.
Using different optical devices to build new constructions—such as toy cameras that create double exposed photographic negatives or a 16mm film camera— I create an illusory space, a fiction based on real decontextualized spaces, that compresses different places and different times across and within one picture plane. The timelessness of the work takes on an aspective fantasy as well as actuality. The fictive space is a construction that I am launching the viewers within. These external spaces of perception and internal spaces of reflection undergo perpetual reconstruction.
The optical opportunities allow viewers to engage with these sites. I ask the viewers to recalibrate their own lenses and consider the ways in which perception and expectation determine how they see as well as what they see.
posted by agnes at 6:38 PM
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