SEAM Symposium 2009 Workshops and Exchanges

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image credit: Margie Medlin

SEAM WORKSHOPS AND EXCHANGES

Perception_Space_Materials Laboratory
Materializing space through design intervention with Dr Benedict Anderson

7-11 SEPTEMBER
LOCATION: FraserStudios, Chippendale

People move – architecture stops. People desire - space defines. The architect collects movements and desires and releases them due to the demands of building. Choreographing Spatial Phrases is one-week laboratory that aims to explore alternative relationships between architecture, perception and the human body in the thinking, making and construction of space. The one-week laboratory will examine how space is perceived and recorded so as to 'action' and 'interact' various design methodologies towards conceiving and designing space.

Starting with the concept of the 'living city' as an entire interconnected entity developed by experimental groups such as Archigram, Superstudio and Archizoom and more recently Beginning as a base for projecting our own collective ideas with the utopian ideals of architectural futurists such as Superstudio, Archigram, Archizoom, OMA and Dillier + Scofidio concepts of the 'living city' as an entire interconnected entity the constructed choreographies will seek to address the gallery as the site for material performances by constructing divergent models. Through developing techniques of spatial observation the laboratory will build towards ‘choreographies of space’ and a ‘dramaturgies of intention’ in form making, human vision and mobility, constructed geometries and articulated surfaces.

Through creating active investigations in the production and perception of space via a series of cognitive day-by-day material constructions, the laboratory seeks to initiate new perceptions of space as the space changes with each new intervention; permitting new understandings to each previous construction. Over the course of 5 days, participants will explore through materials, an ongoing installation based on choreographies of space embodied within.

Below is a sequence by sequence of each day’s material intervention that explores the architectural, choreographic and filmic conventions through material constructions and distortions.

Day 1 – Monday 7 SEPT 10 – 6 PM
Choreographing geometries and fractures - definition of space.
Materials: rope (400metres).

Day 2 – Tuesday 8 SEPT 10 – 6 PM
Figure, object and illusion – spatial distortion.
Materials: cable ties (5000 pieces).

Day 3 – Wednesday 9 SEPT 10 – 6 PM
Drawn, sequenced and shaded – filmic – reactive responses scenario animations on the body and space (story boarding figure and space via wall drawings).
Materials: graphite pencils 2 colours red and black (60).

Day 4 – Thursday 10 SEPT 10 – 6 PM
Notated, recorded and played – sonic dimensions - sound and music.
Materials: record players, tape players, recorders (analogue) various found various numbers.

Day 5 – Friday 11 SEPT 10 - 6 PM
Room writing and writing the dance – mass production instant production of ideas.
Materials: still digital cameras (participants own), printers (2) mobile phones text messaging, laptops.

Speaking Landscapes
Professional Exchange with Carol Brown and Dorita Hannah
13-15 SEPTEMBER 10 – 4 PM
LOCATION: Critical Path, Rushcutters Bay

Speaking Landscapes is a 3–day laboratory that brings together local practitioners with UK practitioner Dr Carol Brown, (Carol Brown Dances, University of Auckland, NZ, and Roehampton University UK) and Professor Dorita Hannah, Architect and Scenographer (College of Creative Arts, Massey University, NZ) to look at and be informed by the synthesis between dance, theatre, new media, visual art and theory.

Architectures in Movement
Workshop with Erin Manning
(Concordia University Research Chair, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University)
17 SEPTEMBER 10 – 4 PM
LOCATION: Critical Path, Rushcutters Bay

This workshop will take as its point of departure my current art project, Folds to Infinity and its participatory installation entitled Slow Clothes. Folds to Infinity is a fabric collection made up of 500 cut and serged pieces. Each of these pieces is cut toward the creation of a piece of clothing or an imminent architecture. The pieces connect through magnets, buttonholes, buttons, hooks and eyes. Folds to Infinity is deployed through mobile architectures – installation environments – that propose different conditions or entry points into the work. Participants are invited to build environments, to create clothing designs or to find new ways of working with the collection.

The workshop will open with the question of how architectures create conditions for movement and how movement creates openings for architecture. Architecture is taken here in the context not only of the build environment but in that of the multiple groundings and passages environments for movement propose. Like the dancer, for whom the ground proposes only one of the options for movement and rest, the architectural environment resists the vertical/horizontal axis that standard notions of built environments foreground. Movements become architectural as architecture begins to move across, through, in planes that are as a modal as they are transversal.

The workshop’s proposal will be the creation of an architecture that invites ways of moving. Movements will be foregrounded that invite and incite relation, emphasizing not the subjects of the movement (the humans themselves) but the intervals – architectural, human and nonhuman – relational movement incites. Part of the workshop will therefore involve exercises in relational movement that experiment with how relational movement makes felt the between. This between will become our point of departure for creating a site-conditioned environment. The mobile architecture we create will be an invitation for thought and experimentation. If conditions allow, we will invite members of the conference to experiment with our mobile installation, thus tweaking both the architecture itself and the conditions for creating movement.

Readings for the workshop:
William James “A World of Pure Experience” from Essays in Radical Empiricism
Erin Manning “A Mover’s Guide to Standing Still” from Relationscapes
Jose Gil “The Dancer’s Body” from A Shock to Thought
Greg Lynn “Differential Gravities” from Folds, Bodies and Blobs

Erin Manning's artistic activities are many. She paints, works with new media, creates sculptures, designs clothes and develops performances from pieces of clothing. In all these activities a central role is played by movements of the body meant to create relationships and meaning. Thus she created the collection ´Folds to Infinity´ (from 2006 on), which is made up of hundreds of prefabricated pieces of cloth held together by buttons, buttonholes, magnets, hooks and eyes etc. In the most varied way clothes can be made out of these pieces. This enables the usual relationship between clothes and body size to be reversed. The body no longer has to make do with standardized wares but can itself determine the wares´ size. Moreover Manning developed a performance, ´Slow Clothes´ (2008), as an experiment in movement on the basis of this collection. Participants were invited to put their clothes together out of the single pieces of cloth, then to move around, eat and drink and thus become a changeable mobile architecture. Clothing became something actively put together and not something to which wearers passively adapted, and this performance can be further developed in the above-mentioned sense of a dance in its relationship with the surrounding space.