In attempt to qualify the everyday stuff around us, we have become dependent upon the photographic image to represent our technological and cultural achievements. This suggests that collectively we acquiesce to the role of the operator and subjugate landscape to that of object. We have become accustomed to violating landscape through the framing of the camera. Simultaneously, we exploit landscape through architecture and war, by means required for land-use, site work, and geographic domination. This development is malignant, rendered as a slow moving violation, anaesthetized to the point of banality. Landscape is living simulacrum, materialized by Architecture into latent form. The problem is, however, that we tend not to see it. We need a new device for landscape projection.
My intent has been to exploit the violation of landscape made available through the gaze of the camera's eye and executed through architecture.
To understand the violation of visuality, one must examine not only Barthes's logic of the camera Operator, the Subject being photographed and the Spectacle of the photograph, but also how the material and technological components of the camera enable this violation.
The materiality of glass in the camera lens allows for focusing of the subject, rendering it as object. It also acts as a physical barrier in architecture--say a storefront window--to separate space but simultaneously allow for visual connections. The lens refracts the light energy projected from the subject as an apparition on the film within the camera body. The image formed is a simulacrum; a fake, a representation of the subject being photographed. When light passes through the camera body and exposes the silver of film, a representation is made visible.
Mirrored glass on skyscrapers acts very similarly within the context of landscape. In this situation, the mirrored skin of the skyscraper reflects the sky and other buildings. This suggests that the building itself produces copies of other buildings like a spectrum of landscape eidolon.
If, as I believe, architecture is the physically violent component of the camera's violation of landscape, then is it possible to translate this formation of the simulacrum into intervention through the materiality of the camera apparatus? If so, what kind of experience is created through this exploitation? By exploring materials inherent to the photographic process, the intervention becomes clear through the use of film. By using architectural techniques of site work and analysis, and through exchanging "study models" for "models," I began a series of staged simulacrums in landscape. These experiments, designed to give experience like catoptric devices, forms abstracted images of the environment, mixing the virtual and reality of everyday life.
Film allows for the reflection and refraction of light energy like an architectural prism, rendering new landscape.
By combining theories and practices together, I have created a series of cinematic interventions in concrete islands. These images are used as tools for mapping the real and virtual landscapes pictured within the latent image. The mappings suggest an unknown landscape sitting within our collective reality; a multitude of other spaces exist without us seeing them directly. Through this process I am staging an occupation in landscape.
My use of the term virtual landscape suggests a cognitively recognizable place that escapes our conventions of time, space and site. In this thesis, I am suggesting that the transformation of subject to object in the spectrum does not just simply end at the formation of the latent image. The transformation continues in the virtual space mapped through the materials shared by architecture and photography. The virtual space is the space of transgression; it is the undefined, vague and ambivalent landscape we cannot fully see nor thus control. Like the JG Ballard novel suggests, the hallucinogenic landscape subjects us to madness. A wonderland seen through the looking glass…
- G. Strong, January 2006
Labels: architecture, film, noise
