PR Architecture space is a true lie, a meticulously designed reality and a paradox of actual and virtual. Inspired by the exhibition, Free and Anonymous Monument (2003) by Jane and Louise Wilson, and one of the buildings imaged in that work, the Apollo Pavilion (1969) by Victor Pasmore, this project pursues artificial vision in architectural design. Free and Anonymous Monument is an architectonic multi-screen environment that produces the image of spatial experience. This architectural environment produces an echo of late-modern European utopianism evidenced in four buildings: Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion, Roche and Dinkeloo’s Cummins Diesel Factory (1966), Owen Luder’s Gateshead Carpark (1962) and a North Sea oil rig. In this image machine, environments merge in relation to time.
Our project extends that aim: it is a study of the relationship between artificial vision and architecture, environment and event, actual and virtual, and reality and relative space. We begin with a YouTube video of the Apollo Pavilion and project an edited version into a physical device. Our video montages three distinct aspects of reality in an architectural environment: stills of the found video, an edited version of the found video overlaid with historical photos and a video of the edited video projected into the physical device. The result is relative space: a Minkovskian event-space.
AA The British abstract artist Victor Pasmore explained his
constructions, paintings and reliefs as attempts to convey the ways our
visual and objective world is rendered ambiguous by modern scientific
ideas like relativity and four-dimensionality. The architecture of his Apollo Pavilion shares the same language with his art but in this case he tried to create a landscape. Our project focuses on how Pasmore’s project is part of the history of a shift of interest from the thing to its image. Like Jane and Louise Wilson’s video installation, Free and Anonymous Monument (2003), our project devises an image machine of different perspectives. We draw on Antonio Damasio’s neurological theory of consciousness as neural network of maps and images.[1] As our video moves along a path, historical photographs are superimposed as memories. We also are inspired by Anton Ehrenzweig’s psycho-analytic theory of unconscious visual scanning as condensation, displacement, fragmentation, duplication and other techniques.[2]
[1] Antonio Damasio, “Making Maps and Making Images,” in Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 67-94, Vintage, 2010. [2] Anton Ehrenzweig, “Unconscious Scanning,” in The Hidden Order of Art, 32-46, University of California Press, 1967.