Open publication - Free publishing
Monday, June 28, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
conclusion
The ocular defined as perceived by the eye, and the Zwischenraum being the interstice of the in-between, is being defined with a sense of Freud’s uncanniness and Foucault’s heterotopian principles. The journey which started in the streets of Soho, London, culminated at the stretch of Berwick Street, Walkers’ Court and Rupert Street. The whole taboo associated with loitering around sex shops making your intentions unclear or questioned causes people to move away from the location of Walkers’ Court as fast as possible. The turning point at the early stages was the identification of the overlapping of activities/environments which were contrasting and generating a sense of the unhomely. These during later studies could be compared to that of an orange peel. At the early stages of this report, a purpose that arose was to control the movement of people in this stretch, and giving them a homely feel during the journey.
Parallel to this observation and study, painting of George Melly by Maggi Hambling as a project within a project proved to be a door opener into various other interpretations and ideas. The life of George Melly as a ‘Surrealist Flâneur’ and Maggi Hambling’s painting technique using vibrant colours and sharp brush strokes were meticulously observed. This led to the theory that a mask was drawn up by the artist, to depict the lifestyle and character of Melly.
Similarly a thought arose of the possibility of a mask on Walkers’ Court and the existence of the space between the mask and the object behind it – the interstitial or Zwischenraum was born. In order to make the Zwischenraum visible to the naked eye, several experiments were done. Comparing the interstitial to the missing links between the disjoint scenes of a movie trailer, breaking up the street stretch into components using broken mirror reflections etc. These exercises were done to clarify the ‘ocular’ aspect of the project.
From the works of Gordon Matta-Clark and Doris Salcedo, new definitions for the ocular interstice were arrived at. For the visualisation of the same, it became imperative to first locate the crack or crevice in the city itself, namely, Walkers’ Court and the need for the materials to be sourced from the street itself.
The architectural proposition of the project was further developed into an installation using the site of Walkers’ Court as the base or the crevice, and materials sourced from the site as the building blocks, to fill the void of the space itself. While the works of Matta-Clark and Doris Salcedo paved way for the methods to be used, there were certain theories that needed to be employed to fully experience the ocular Zwischenraum.
The type of heterotopia that the project attempts to create is similar to the heterotopia of time, but with a slight twist. Taking into account the space used to fill, and the fact that the constituent materials make it ephemeral, it forms more of a heterotopia of space. Since Freud defines the uncanny as becoming de familiarised and de realised, the aspect is evident only when it is transplanted into a new unfamiliar turf. The material library here would still create a nostalgic effect, for the simple reason it is reminiscent of the origin.
Friday, June 4, 2010
portable....
The Portable book unit made using a pile of discarded books off Berwick Street and an abandoned orphan trolley.
Garbage Wall by Gordon Matta-Clark
I think this is the recreated one by Jane Crawford.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
The Uncanny - Sigmund Freud
Exerts from 'The Uncanny'
The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’; certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.
The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’; certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.
The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’] the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion.
We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny.
...find out what meaning has come to be attached to the word ‘uncanny’ in the course of its history; or we can collect all those properties of persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these examples have in common....both courses lead to the same result: the uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.
....relation of uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.
From the idea of ‘homelike’, ‘belonging to the house’, the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret; and this idea is expanded in many ways...
Heimlich – various interpretations and meanings:
1. Adj. And adv. Vernaculus, occultus; MHG, heimelich, Heimlich
2. A place free from ghostly influences... familiar, friendly, intimate.
3. Familiar, amicable, unreserved.
4. Heimlich councillors; officials who give important advice which has to be kept secret in matters of state.
5. Used of knowledge – mystic, allegorical: a Heimlich meaning, mysticus, divines, occultus, figuratus.
6. That which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge
7. The notion of something hidden and dangerous.
Heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of Heimlich.
‘In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automation and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.’
The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief. There seems to be a contradiction here; but perhaps it is only a complication, which may be helpful to us later on.
...the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.
...the discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as uncanny.
...the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ [‘un-‘] is the token of repression.
...the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [Heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition.
...our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition – not everything that recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race – is on that account uncanny.
...what is the origin of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude?
...these preliminary results have satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and that what remain probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry. But that would be to open door to doubts about what exactly is the value of our general contention that the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been repressed.
The uncanny as it is depicted in literature,......is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life. The contrast between what has been repressed and what has been surmounted cannot be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction without profound modification....
The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effect in fiction that there are in real life.
FREUD, S. 1919. The Uncanny.
FREUD, S. 1919. The Uncanny.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between
Berlin Wall Graffiti now exists, as with many of Matta-Clark's larger scale works, only as a documentary photograph. However, our experience of it is enriched by a letter Matta-Clark wrote from Berlin, a classic surrealist document rich in irony, that describes the Wall in purely aesthetic terms, separate from any political or social context. "There is no work that matches its shameless grace," he wrote, "which now runs in smooth serpentine curves through the city.... the Berliners' dull or oblivious sense of its presence is heightened, rekindled into a captive round of applause especially for the children who play along it and the patient vigilant army who caress it with their aimed binoculars from within and without.... Elegance. I wondered who it is for, who the architect of this labor of blinded love. Such a creative monument cannot be without its personalities without its inspired originators but in a magnanimous act of community spirit the pleasure of its inventors remains annonimous." He was particularly taken with the new, smooth Ferro blocks which replaced the "folksy, rustic finish" of the Walls, hastily erected earlier version, seeing it as the "moral and physical renewal of preworld war Bauhaus vision. The German design machine has conquered America and the world only to return to Berlin through the wall."
Attlee, J. and L. Le Feuvre (2003). Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between, Architectural Association.
Attlee, J. and L. Le Feuvre (2003). Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between, Architectural Association.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
the 'strip'
The broken reflections of the key visual attractions along Rupert Street to Peter Street.
The images formed on the box-a visual device that creates the broken reflections of the streetscape. The broken images forms a complete stretch by using specific viewpoints.
With the key visuals.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
The Ocular Zwischenraum -updated
What?
Zwischenraum[1]
Every object or scene in nature has two aspects to it – the interior and the exterior. There exists a connecting element or a packet that fuses the two rather distinct layers. It may also be interpreted as a `passage’.
The connecting packets of disjoint scenes in a movie or the elements in a cityscape are usually invisible to the common eye. It is these elements that contain a larger story and that maintain the continuity of the unheimlich[2] union.
While exploring the various portions of Soho, differentiated distinctly by the functions of the occupying spaces, I came across the stretch of Rupert Street – Walker’s court and Peter Street. This street possessed some highly contrasting activities that seemed to be juxtaposed onto the streetscape, still co-existing fruitfully. This juxtaposition led to the study of the connecting elements or passages that make possible the unheimlich union. It seems necessary to make these passages visible, thereby making a whole new sequence from these passages.
In my project I am going to deal with these passages in the space time continuum[3].
Why?
An entire movie or storyboard can be formed out of the diagrammatic representation of the connecting elements. It has the potential to give rise to an entirely new by product from a normally unintentional source.
More often the ignored parts of a sequence are the links or connecting elements. The mystery lies in the disjoint elements of a sequence. The connecting elements thereby have the power to broadcast secrecy. These connecting packets or passages determine the relationship between the real and the virtual.
By giving a visible form to this, we are able to express the relationship between the two disjoint stories. This could even be unheimlich. The unheimlich union of two or more elements the real and the virtual can define the interstitial realm of the space.
Thus one of the main intention would be to make the unseen visible by giving the interpretation of the in-between space a form. Also, to form a new complete circle/storyboard from only the connecting passages.
How?
I would like to begin by exposing the connecting elements of a trailer video “passages”, which depicts various scenarios shot in Taiwan. The graphical representation of the interpretations gives birth to the interstitial passages that connect the various scenes together.
The uncanniness can be brought in by the forced juxtaposition of a scenario different from the original source.
The whole juxtaposition of the two different elements viz. the connecting packages of a video and the streetscape of Soho brings out the invisible interstices that can exist around us in nature.
By using the trailer “Passages[4]” as a reference, draw the interpreted connecting packets of the disjoint scenes. Make a new storyboard by using just the connecting elements. This story board when placed in a particular streetscape in Soho would define the “element of surprise” I experienced in the street. This would make the connecting passages in this stretch visible to the normal eye.
Hence, the Zwischenraum that exists in the particular streetscape of Soho becomes ocular[5].
References/Influences
1. Singh, Tarsem – The Cell (2000) movie – graphical representation of the mind of a psychotic killer.
2. Hirst, Damien – artist – reference for depiction of horse split into sections by glass panels (scene from The Cell).
3. Nerdrum, Odd – Norwegian figurative painter – based on anecdote and narrative
4. Giger, Hans Rudolf ‘Ruedi’ – Swiss surrealist artist – set designer for Alien.
5. Quay, Timothy; Quay, Stephen; (Brothers Quay) – stop motion animators
6. Romanek, Mark – director – music videos:
a. Closer (1994) by Nine Inch Nails
b. The Perfect Drug (1997) by Nine Inch Nails
c. Bedtime story (1995) by Madonna
7. Sigismondi, Floria – director
8. Freud, Sigmond, ‘The Uncanny’ – essay (1919).
9. Deleuze, Gille and Guattari, Felix – ‘The Actual and the Virtual’ essay, translated by Albert, Elliot Ross
10. Salcedo, Doris – installation at International Istanbul biennial 2003.
11. ‘Liquid City’ – Marc Atkins / Iain Sinclair
[2] A Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Zwischenraum / Passages
Zwischenraum[1]
Every object or scene in nature has two aspects to it – the interior and the exterior. There exists a connecting element or a packet that fuses the two rather distinct layers. It may also be interpreted as a `passage’. In my project I am going to deal with these passages in the space time continuum[2].
The connecting packets of disjoint scenes in a movie or the elements in a cityscape are usually invisible to the common eye. It is these elements that contain a larger story and that maintain the continuity of the unheimlich[3] union.
An entire movie or storyboard can be formed out of the diagrammatic representation of the connecting elements. It has the potential to give rise to an entirely new by product from a normally unintentional source.
More often the ignored parts of a sequence are the links or connecting elements. The mystery lies in the disjoint elements of a sequence. The connecting elements thereby have the power to broadcast secrecy. These connecting packets or passages determine the relationship between the real and the virtual.
By giving a visible form to this, we are able to express the relationship between the two disjoint stories. This could even be unheimlich. The unheimlich union of two or more elements the real and the virtual world can define the interstitial realm of the space.
I would like to begin by exposing the connecting elements of a trailer video “passages”, which depicts various scenarios shot in Taiwan. The graphical representations of my interpretations can give birth to the interstitial passages that connect the various scenes together.
The uncanniness can be brought in by the forced juxtaposition of a scenario different from the original source.
The whole juxtaposition of the two different elements viz. the connecting packages of a video and the streetscape of Soho brings out the invisible interstices that can exist around us in nature.
References/Influences
1. The Cell – movie by Tarsem Singh – graphical representation of the mind of a psychotic killer.
2. Damien Hirst – artist – reference for depiction of horse split into sections by glass panels (scene from The Cell).
3. Odd Nerdrum – Norwegian figurative painter – based on anecdote and narrative
4. H. R. Giger – Swiss surrealist artist – set designer for Alien.
5. Brothers Quay – stop motion animators
6. Mark Romanek – director – music videos:
a. Closer (1994) by Nine Inch Nails
b. The Perfect Drug (1997) by Nine Inch Nails
c. Bedtime story (1995) by Madonna
7. Floria Sigismondi – director
8. ‘The Uncanny’ – essay by Sigmond Freud (1919).
9. ‘The Actual and the Virtual’ essay by Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari translated by Elliot Ross Albert
10. Doris Salcedo – installation at International Istanbul biennial 2003.
11. ‘Liquid City’ – Marc Atkins / Iain Sinclair
[3] A Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
unheimlich
The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, "un-home-ly") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html Das Unheimliche (essay)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unheimlich
Weird, uncanny
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unheimlich
Sunday, January 24, 2010
metropolis - to see
Watch Metropolis 1927 - Restored Trailer in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
info on the film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)
Friday, January 22, 2010
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