Spatial design: Feedback
Created by Leeser Architecture
Rips, Tears and Folds
The map
In its most familiar form, a map is a representation of a territory; a visual device that renders physical properties, relationships, adjacencies–the data of space–in abstract symbols. This spatial representation is inscribed on a surface no thicker than paper or the ever more thin LCD screen. Often a map is the most perceptibly real trait of the space it describes. How otherwise would we visualise the London Tube?The properties, relationships, and adjacencies–the space–of the curated artwork of FEEDBACK is an already abstracted landscape.
Can the mapmaking procedure be run in reverse? Maybe a map can be used to make the space and topology of the art spatial? How would this map be inscribed within the immense volume of the LABoral? Perhaps this would change the way in which the exhibition is rendered?
THE FOLD. One feature long associated with popular modern paper maps is that they are folded. Folding makes them portable. Vast expanses of geography, and by its abstract extension–space, can be made to fit in your pocket by folding the thin surface of the map onto itself. The act of folding adds the dimension of mutability to the map-reader’s understanding of the mapped space. The fl atness of the map can be altered to allow for easy measurement between abstractions with reality with each step. Can the tension between the twodimensional map and three-dimensional space inform the structure of the exhibition space? When does the map become more immediate than the space it represents? Can this new spatial map of the exhibition be folded too?
YOU ARE HERE, ARE YOU?. Maps are tools. They allow their readers to conceive of new relationships through an augmented perception of the actual space. But maps need not always be followed. The relationships they describe can be ambiguous ones.Is it possible to draw a new map in the space to be used for others to inscribe their own experience? Could the space be opened up between abstraction and form to allow for a new and more visceral participation in the exhibition? Instead of being a set of directions, could it be a set of possibilities? These questions are tested in the exhibition architecture of FEEDBACK. A flat surface is inserted into the volume of LABoral. Through carefully calibrated folding, the surface is manipulated to receive the specific media of each artwork; be they projected images, monitors, objects, or prints. The operations are undertaken to encourage in the visitor a Situationist dérive through the gallery environment to encourage established as well as emergent relationships between the works. Through the creasing, scoring, cutting, turning, enfolding, and unfolding of this single surface, the map is the new space of the gallery, with the artworks mapped onto and in some cases into the thin skin.1: The Map 2: The Folding 3: The Folded Surface 4, 5, 6: Views of the Galleries
