The ship becomes part of the border, but whilst being anchored it claims a new territory. When the ship sinks - the theatre of the absurd escapes the room of the ship out to the landscape.
The limit is exercised in both ways:
1. Vertical: The ship is stabilized with grid slab which divides the ship on the waterline. Natural and artificial is divided - first top of the ship becomes a spectacle - with it's interior and furnishings preserved and consumed as object of tourism. Bottom half makes use of watertight bulkheads to turn parts of the ship hull as a reservoir that collects water and pump it to the man-made landscape.
2. Horizontal: Stretched on grid slab is a colony of artificial waterscape. Fake beaches, swimming pool, onsen, down to dipping pool before the slab turns into descend into steps to access the relic.
I'm still trying to figure out what could happen to the 0.6 buffer zone more than a visual 'limit'. Will try working on images of artificial landscape. This image is just a quick try out and it's not saying much as yet but will work on others too.
Tutorial with Christina today, all good, but she said I should shift my focus from the site and technical problems and back to design. Basically the discussion was about:
1. Coastline extension using 'groyne' structure principle that accelerates sediment accumulation following longshore drift
2. Controlled erosion - not exactly feasible since Giglio island is almost entirely out of granite that does not erode - so materiality has to bridge between granite (land) and steel (ship)
3. Less focus on construction process and more on the ambition of the project - at least for Monday
Some of the drawings that I showed her - they need annotations and pimping up i know -
Had a tutorial with Christina today - it was great, we focused only on material which was very helpful. She advised me to construct set of images before even start 3D modelling - or at least work in parallel. I have been trying to do that between precedent-tracing madness and making layout aka empty pages with titles... but hasn't been too fruitful! For interim, she suggested making a digital model of physical model testing different materials and how they start to merge.
In the discussion what I find interesting is the question of whether the landscape and the ship should be about BORDER TRANSITION or COLLISION. We discussed the image of the rock and the hull and how they collide into one.
I made super quick diagrams to illustrate few options i had in mind but I'm not happy with any of them yet. I think the proposal will benefit from my research and precedents that is yet to be in any way comprehensive.
Some TS whitebook pages that are NON-BLANK. Images won't be that big, that is only for tutorial purpose (and lack of content).
I'm trying to stitch together all the feedback from the jury - they to be wrapped in one single argument but for now they're still floating pieces of ideas. Some update:
1. I am officially without Adobe. Help!
2. Have been looking into 'Exquisite Corpse' as mentioned by Stefano. It is basically a collage technique used by surrealist and dada, supposedly fragments are constructed separately by each individual, and then combined together as one single work. This one below is by Breton and 3 other people. I intend to still take on board the stitched map of the 'ship's universe' as my thick drawing - but need to figure out the purpose of the drawing more precisely.
3. Trying to edit the map without photoshop so excuse the colour - below are the drawings i showed on the table that talks about the curation or border and territories. Drawing may zoom in and out and even cross between the interior of the ship out to the landscape/city/fictional site.
It's too abstract I know but trying to sketch some other ideas...
4. Yes, the sinking ship is ON BOARD. I still have the problem with constructing the narrative , as in, how much of the project is about the ship on its heyday - and how much about its aftermath.
I'm thinking that the cruise director's room should still be the key space. How the room is designed, and its relationship to the whole ship's entity - will be revealed when the ship starts to sink.
Some ideas for TS: what if the cruise director's room is designed to anticipate the tragic fate! Perhaps when the ship tilts it behaves like a pendulum, forever trying to maintain equilibrium .... but for what purpose???! Just thinking out loud.
Familiarizing myself with the ship (which btw, in cruise industry, it's only a mid-range sized!)
Some awesome pictures of interior of the ship before and after:
I find the horizontal/vertical transformation very intriguing as spatial experience.
On Tuesday Alex and I discussed how to integrate the cruise director's room to the thick drawing. We both agreed that it should look less 'ship'-y and focus on the layers of events and manipulated space within the ship and their parallels in the city, if there's any.
I showed him reference from Diller & Scofidio which is looking more like a model but describes well this idea that the form (curved house replaced by the ship form) can remain generic or static, and when punctured in sections we start to see the ship's split worlds and hierarchical spaces.
What Alex suggested is as the drawing it might be useful to have it as conceptual plans, where the cruise director's office becomes the one drawing that can move around and be plugged in to different space/border/territory (like when the ship sails, or dock, or pass through).
At the moment i'm still working on the ship triptych - still floating in rhino world now, needs to be rendered soon.
I showed him reference from Diller & Scofidio which is looking more like a model but describes well this idea that the form (curved house replaced by the ship form) can remain generic or static, and when punctured in sections we start to see the ship's split worlds and hierarchical spaces.
What Alex suggested is as the drawing it might be useful to have it as conceptual plans, where the cruise director's office becomes the one drawing that can move around and be plugged in to different space/border/territory (like when the ship sails, or dock, or pass through).
At the moment i'm still working on the ship triptych - still floating in rhino world now, needs to be rendered soon.
At the moment still working on Triptych #2: City-Cruise-Nowhere image.
Have been constantly changing my mind about this section of the cruise.
I guess what I'm trying to show in this image is the idea of
The middle panel will also have a triptych inside a triptych, so I will start with the middle of the middle panel showing a recreation of a city with infinite horizon as the backdrop.
As the image reveal the rest, we start to see hierarchy and split worlds between different classes and also between the crews.
There are so many things i cant seem to figure out, well, mostly argument-wise. I guess I will start building up the collage and have more discussions about it tomorrow.
Have been constantly changing my mind about this section of the cruise.
I guess what I'm trying to show in this image is the idea of
The middle panel will also have a triptych inside a triptych, so I will start with the middle of the middle panel showing a recreation of a city with infinite horizon as the backdrop.
As the image reveal the rest, we start to see hierarchy and split worlds between different classes and also between the crews.
There are so many things i cant seem to figure out, well, mostly argument-wise. I guess I will start building up the collage and have more discussions about it tomorrow.
Still working on the WB, changed the layout, basically made most of them more condensed and have distinguishable layout and text..
Yesterday I was doing research for TS and found this great book which specifically talks about architecture of ships and comparison between ships and cities...
"Earlier liners were linked in many ways to the life and social patterns of the cities between which the plied, and were occasionally themselves depicted as one aspect of metropolitan life."
The Steerage 1907, Alfred Stieglitz:
"What Stieglitz discovers in The Steerage is a maritime space that becomes metropolitan, vertical and hierarchical, jam packed with anonimity. The ship, the largest machine capable of being pictured in its totality, yields a partial image of that larger, unpicturable machine: the city." - Allan Sekula
One side of the room is getting and the other corner is coming along..
Had a TS tutorial and discuss some nice ideas with Javier - hopefully the renderings will come out ok tonight!![111208-CRUISE-DIRECTOR-[Converted].jpg](http://www.aadip9.net/wynn/111208-CRUISE-DIRECTOR-%5BConverted%5D.jpg)
Our experience of cities is founded on a multitude of acts of boundary making, constantly expanding from our room, to the house, the street, and the interiors we spend our time in. By the repetition of our actions we define our own territory that sits within a larger stage of places we inhabit. Cabaret Voltaire is a story of an escape, or a transgression of one's own territory into a further intensity of a limit, to allow for freedom.
In the Re-Con the space of event is re-enacted through the narrative of its founders. Through self-impose exile they crossed the geographical territory to construct a form of boundary in a room, the virtue of which lies in the limits of time and other invisible borders (political, social, ideological). The re-making of the room of Cabaret Voltaire ultimately creates a stage for this crossing of limits - the influence they bring into the room, the performances within it, and the works that transcend beyond it which forms another series of events.
As the founders of Cabaret Voltaire were in search of this space of freedom to stage their protest - we too, are in constant search for an escape from the geography of normality of our everyday life. Freedom is a space of construct - it conveys the absence of limit, when it only works in a form of confine. The efficacy of the confinement demands temporality; lies within its border are seeds of crossings and dispersion.
Out of our city, out of the everyday - the idea of escape and freedom becomes the currency, and limit is the interface. The chosen site is a non-site, a place where time and limit is a pure construct, the plasticity one may chose over our real city. Through the consumption and mechanism of this floating city the potential of a city as a stage is explored.
Working on the boat layers. Excruciatingly slow.
Last tutorial was very useful because now I have a typology to work on. Am now swimming in cartographic world and seafarer ethnography and getting a bit lost between the two. I know that it shouldn't be about designing some sort of cruise liner nor it should be a new type of map. I am now trying to place my research in a room, not THE room, but a map shop. The shop could be the beginning (or ending) of the narrative where this fictional floating city is re-constructed into different forms of maps as commodities.
This is sort of the foetus of my '3D or thick Map' model. The idea is to map an individual's experience of the city through a set of territories expanding from body to building and architecture scale. Up to this point she jumped on a bus on the way to work but I have to stop a bit here to re-think what I'm trying to get out of this.
Anyway.
A nice quote on furniture as territory:
"...enables the body to be most directly affected by, but also protected from, the chaos of every outside: "For our most intimate or most abstract endeavours, whether they occur in bed or on a chair, furniture supplies the immediate physical environment in which our bodies act and react: for us, urban animals, furniture is thus our primary territory."
I think it was Deleuze.
So the idea of this map evolved from the notion of 'diffused city' whereby an individual impose upon herself sets of limits which, through this 3D map, creates a territory of her own city. To some extent she is confined into the interiority of the domicile, the mobile, and the commercial - a city as fragments of limits that constantly expanding and contracting. I still, however, do not know what I'm questioning or critiquing.
Another quote on map vs. experience of a space:
"...the point is a simple one that is now echoed in a critical literature on cartography -that hegemonic types of mapping represent space as a 'completed horizontality' - in which the dynamism of change is exorcised in favour of a totality of connections. Mapping is one of a number of ways in which the disruptiveness of space is tamed"
So perhaps I could explore this 'disruptiveness' through the idea of 'confinement' instead of connectivity.
Rather than agonizing over my perpetual confusion about the room and the universe, I am trying to define what is it exactly I'm trying to get out of the idea of a limit and here are some of the reference I've been looking at...
Limit vs.Territory
Containment as graft (from Bucky's dome over Manhattan)
or
Displaced containment (from Synecdoche New York)
And the cyclical fate of a map as limit:
"'Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.' Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions."
--- Jose Louis Borges
A map of the warehouse with a stage set of a warehouse that contains a set of a warehouse that houses 1:1 parts of New York City. Example of nested limits:
Map that gives territory (situations and physical experience) a confinement within which relational spaces are synthesised.
Since the city is already a mutable, superposed and diffuse and not always physical entity, and it cannot be understood from the classic perspective, perhaps through a confinement (of a format) one can begin to construct its elusive inhabitations.
"We have the tools, we make the map, tattoo the city. Everything is the same operation. A singular operation about the construction of the city and the interpretation of worlds." Jose Morales
Can map be a room from which territory is constructed - and not the other way around?
From Robert Smithson's 'Mapping Dislocations', 1967
Smithson's use of topographic maps from that project led him to develop a small but focused body of works based on his notions of mapping as fictive sites that pre-figured his sculptures called nonsites.
So here we go, I'm back to the wonderful world of NON-SITE that I brought upon myself through Cabaret Voltaire and its NO-BOX!
The room and the universe comes as split personalities that are yet to be constructed. As the fragments of the room are assembled, the resulting space manifest itself as an enclosed entity while rendering the universe dismantled.
THE ROOM
The room will be a montage from series of spaces traversed by a person who moves move in and out of the city. On one scale it comprised of endless labyrinth of spaces of the everyday in a building: the classroom, the supermarket, the tube station, the interior of car. On the flip side is the array of exterior faces: building facades, windows, entrance door, etc. This split defines our experience of the city that increasingly becomes endless terrain of fragmentary spaces. The room is assembled to form a limit, and as it folds into an enclosure, it disrupts the city on the flip side.
THE UNIVERSE
The universe is the result of the assembly of the room. In his universe, the boundless flows and trajectories of the city is momentary interjected by the room. The universe, in its stillness and fragmented state allowed the individual in the room, within his self-imposed alienation, to construct his own universe.
-----------------------
Obviously the text is way too abstract even for myself. It was much clearer this morning as I sketched the image but midway I decided that the image becomes more of a model and to some extent becomes yet another version of my re-con sans the characters. I will need to refine what I am trying to achieve here. Will re-model.
Been working on finishing my re-con model. It's getting there..The graphics are not the yet because for the life of me I can never manage to get a lasercutting slot. If whoever has fast internet and is willing to help me book a slot for tomorrow I will greatly appreciate it and will provide some rewards (a week supply of kit kat?).
Also the it's supposed to be 4 different shades of varnish but somehow come out all the same. Will repaint.
I am, however, looking forward to move on from re-con since I am still not sure how to progress to the next stage.
