Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures
Abstract
This is a journey between two points. Borne of an experience travelling east to west from exterior to interior and out again, on one of the original North-American transcontinental railways. In the form of a sweeping Cinemascope survey of movement through time and space it is a piece of design fiction, intended to textually depict our hero’s narrative arc as they travel from one state to another. Across an extended landscape, experienced from within the constant of a rail car and its wider social, cultural and historical network, a critical reflection upon the mediation of space, time and action dynamically frames that which is open, and that which is liminal. Playing on the filmic quality of the journey – discussing the parallel development of cinema and the transcontinental railroad as projects concerned equally with projection of histories and spaces of reality – it creates a story through competing modes of engagement and the apparatus of this construction: from notions of collective / individual, perspective / perception, to view / experience and fixed / mobile. As a series of encounters between people within a larger narrative and spatiotemporal framework, cinema provides a useful point of reference to the long-distance rail journey and its basis in an environmental, experiential construct (a design) for a cast of characters (audience). But whilst the route is prescribed, and the train interior a highly scripted space with movement staged across a series of engineered backdrops, the narrative here is not fixed. Thinking beyond definitive or static sets of relations, this paper asks how designers might re-frame experiences around a mobilised perspective within the multivalent contemporary terrain; how design can help us navigate shifting values within fluid and variously formed scenarios. This is a journey somewhere between the objective and interpretative into a post-prescriptive time and space.
Louise Martin is a designer whose experience working with studios that lead enquiry into the interior, in all its myriad forms, includes Pentagram, Ab Rogers Design, Ben Kelly Design and Casson Mann. Exposure to a range of disciplinary expertise, approaches and influences has led to the development of an interiors-based creative practice that is cross-sectoral, whilst advanced within the area of exhibition and experience design. These areas of expertise are expanded through associated creative research activities and in her roles within education.