By Doung Jahangeer and Rosa Menkman.
Site specific projection for the Stadsdeelkantoor, Westerpark, Amsterdam. Made during The Media City workshop at NIMK. Projected on the 2nd of April.
During The workshop, I met Doung Jahangeer who lives and works in South Africa. His work is based on the cracks within (social) architectures, that allow the explorer to define and create new, other space.
In his presentation on Tuesday (23th of March) Doung presented his manifesto on architecturewithoutwalls (to be published), which had a lot of similarities with both my glitch studies manifesto and in-between manifesto. We explored these connections within the small text we wrote that formed the basis of our collaborative projected "Vanishing Lines".
Vanishing Lines // Vanishing Points
The creation of space as a concept as well as a practice, cannot be defined within entities, but is defined between different entities, and their perspectives. The architecture of space is in-between, and always multi-layered.
In Vanishing Lines, the building is locked into a grid of its surrounding; the space of operating templates, the grid of the Westerpark. These structures are highlighted and then collapsed onto the building, the canvas.
The lines on the building resonate visual perception; different perspectives are being aligned. Sometimes they create a coalition, and sometimes they create collision. A construction created out of multiple perspectives that evolve into a hypertrophic resonance.
The architecture can be freed by repositioning the membranes of perspectives. In this instance, the subtext of architectural language is set free. What comes to existence is an architecture without walls.
In this architecture without walls, the multiple perspectives in space create place. These space-makers provide the potential to alter perception.
Architects must learn to loose control and recognize that creativity exists everywhere: because the ability of space-making exists in everybody.
In Vanishing Lines, for a moment, the building has become a landscape with multiple horizons, in which orientation between top and bottom does not exist. The landscape is artificial. It exists in-between the dichotomy of the real but totally constructed horizon and a digital fantasy horizon. The architecture does not automatically give the viewer the confidence to position himself, but instead, the viewer has to reterritorialize his environment and in so doing, he is forced to choose his own vanishing lines.
After writing the basic text we went to the site to make photos and draw up the grid (virtual and real) that exist around the building.
We drew lines on the grid, that formed a new architectural shape, and placed parts of the text on top of this shape. With the help of some digital glitches, we collapsed this shape, which formed a new space construction.
The first movie I made was high contrasted red and black, but it did not print nicely on the brick building :: the red light did not reflect at all, and the text was not readable because of the 3d surface. In fact in further testing it became clear that only few colors reflected and only hard shaped edges and abstract images were recognizable - the photos were unfortunately unusable. This is why I changed the pace and build up of the video - more basic, simple with contrasts in colors and speed.
the result is a very basic video, that did work well on the building. the soundtrack based on Goto80s MCMCMC made it perfect. The video is centered around the idea that we can choose and create our own vanishing lines.
Video documentation will be added soon.
(Music by Goto80: parts of MCMCMC)