View: Submission 2
Background
What places and non-places might surface at the outer edges of human perception; what material and immaterial experiences might arise as a place falls under siege of algorithmic computation; what situations might manifest in the brute synthesis of physical matter and abstract information before collapsing into certain oblivion?
Places offers the construction sites of possible worlds. For instance, J.G Ballad, in a short text “The Sound-Sweep” narrates a future scenario in which sounds no longer dissipate but persist in monolithic heaps as discarded residues. The muted protagonist vacuums up the spectral residues from the echo bin and dumps it into a sonic waste-land. The author writes, “The ‘place’ of strange echoes and festering silences, overhung with a gloomy miasma of a million compacted sounds, it remained remote and haunted, the graveyard of countless private babels”. It is in the hushed soundscape, in the inaudible where a place manifests.
Places operate as integrated heaps of spatiotemporal phenomena, ranging from the life-compatible epoch in cosmic time or the insulated space of a mother’s womb to the aero-magnetic space of chemical warfare; the primordial space of human gestures in the Lascaux Cave or the trace-fossils of an extinct civilisation; the political space of extinction rebellion to the territorial space of nomad war-machines in the Middle East.
How can we explore different aspects of place, space, territory and environment? What can different methods of recording, rethinking, reshaping, remaking or remixing place accomplish in terms of sonic, semiotic and situated narratives and character.
The theme would situate design in the digital counterparts of physical places, to uncover territories where coherence of the experience disintegrates, where objects can exist in multiple places at the same time, where events are smeared across spatial boundaries, where streams of percepts diverge, scales coalesce and histories fracture
Think about the possible representations of place, ways of experiencing or negotiating environments that may be liminal, cultural, ecological, industrial etc. and could be speculative, fictitious or factual, emotive, informative, and rhetorical.
The project advances the use of remote sensing and design informatics to augment perception and extend audition in order to register local, site-specific environments across Edinburgh, Scotland, as high-resolution spatial datasets that expose and activate the spatial, temporal and cultural properties of place.
One way to approach this project is through LiDAR scanning, photogrammetry, 360 images and field recording.
Where do we go from here?
What you will learn on this project:
- Methods for capturing spatial data
- Ways of presenting and interacting with spatial data
- Critical discourse around space, aesthetic, narrative and culture
Suggested submission forms and formats:
- Interaction-based data sculptures
- Cinematic installations
- Simulated experiences
Suggested reading, resources and examples:
- https://scanlabprojects.co.uk/
- https://data.nls.uk/data/map-spatial-data/lidar-george-iv-bridge/
- https://forensic-architecture.org/
- Recall Reflection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fk_h7kH30I
- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6987633
If you’re reading this in order, please proceed to the next post: ‘Echoes and Absences Concept’.
