MONUMENTALISING THE MICRO

Y4

 

REAL VS. REALITY: MICRO WORLDS

A debit card; a scalpel; a wall. The familiar objects in life often go ignored. This project seeks to defamiliarise the ordinary by magnifying and focusing on the surfaces, textures and crevices of the world around us. It seeks to find the ontological essence of the object beyond our immediate perception of it, searching for the implications of the physical artefact beyond itself. Using analog and digital techniques I attempt to capture fragmented traces of these worlds and explore their part-to-whole relationship. By constructing my own worlds I test the limits of technology and the glitches that it can be coerced into producing. Photogrammetric surfaces can be inhabited on both sides; the sub-surface exists but it is inaccessible in the phenomenological world. These worlds are haptic – where eyes become fingertips. They are worlds of certain form and ambiguous origin. They are documented by the anthropomorphic camera and through use of shallow focus we can caress our way through these miniature landscapes. Using a different photographic tool – the flat-bed scanner – we can capture these worlds and animate them. In a frame with rails, everyday objects, forgotten flea-market trinkets and scaleless architectures move around in a choreographed dance with the slowly advancing scanner-line. This ‘theatre’ reveals the relationships between these objects in fragments as they traverse the line whilst it battles against the temporal axis. Stop-motion allows us to zoom into the high resolution and montage a kinetic sequence which operates at different scales.

 

 

 

 

BORING NAPLES: BUILD PROJECT

This project seeks to explore the urban fabric of Naples, Italy both above and below ground. A vast existing subterranean network below Naples gives precedent to the possibility of a masterplan which could connect the existing businesses and create a quieter, cooler throughway to bypass the hectic city above. The practical focuses of the project are a rigorous mapping exercise of the existing cavities (of which there are very little official sources of information), understanding the existing aqueduct and sewage infrastructure (going back to Greek times), and on creating and repurposing mining and quarrying techniques. It is important that the construction process reuses excavated mate-rial and embraces the benefits of Roman concrete (lime mortar) in the Neapolitan climate and malleable urban fabric. The design focuses are a negotiation of negative and positive spaces (above and below ground) through an array of making experiments. Casting, and carving have allowed an understanding of this spatial duality and many of the techniques over both projects provide a fertile ground of curiosity and refinement in 5th year.