Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

In this paper an architectural reading of several artists’ films will demonstrate how techniques from structural film – such as extended duration, a removal of human protagonists, and a tectonic approach to the relationship between material, form, structure and meaning – offer strategies for time-based architectural representation.

Drawing together parallel ideas from architectural representation, artists’ film theory, and analogy studies, along with those in some of the work of Benjamin and Peirce, this paper will posit an analogical connection between the “lived” (embodied) experiences of both filmic and pro-filmic space. It will argue that in the “real time/space” of a screening event (Le Grice) the embodied and spatially situated viewer (Sobchack) experiences a new spatiotemporal condition which is analogous to that of the filmed space.

The paper will conclude with a presentation of work from Kingston M.Arch Unit 7’s inaugural studio project. 100 years after László Moholy-Nagy commenced work on his Light Space Modulator kinetic sculpture Unit 7 students started their year drawing upon Moholy-Nagy’s iconic work. As with Moholoy-Nagy’s original sculpture and his Light Play film, physical artefacts became the source for a range of “light drawings” – in a time of virtual light and mass-less material, the project engages with the interaction of material artefact and photonic light as a process of architectural, temporal, and tectonic exploration. The techniques explored in this project are precursors to work which will utilise the filming of architectural models for architectural exploration and representation.