Exhibition Statement:

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dislocation: habit

this prosaic landscape  (of borrowed experience)

 

 

Constructed space, then, is more than the concrete and material substance of constructed structures, the permanence of elements and the architectronics of urbanistic details. It also exists as the sudden proliferation and the incessant multiplication of special effects, which, along with the consciousness of time and distances, affect the perception of the environment.    

              - Paul Virilio from The Overexposed City

 

 

Architecture, when stated simply, is a system of lines, boundaries and definitions that create a structure. To say it is merely a structure, however, misses the point; an architecture is built by the proximities of residential and transitional experience and its space is defined by the experiences, memories and iterations of those who have lived in and amongst its boundaries. Such a space need not merely be physical, but instead can reside in the psyche of any individual; indeed, any architecture begins as a system of thought.

 

In our contemporary state, media is an architecture we find ourselves living within. It is between the boundaries of our primary (physical) lived experience and the absorption of mediated information that we construct our memories. In the same manner that mid to late 19th century Americans experienced profound shifts in consciousness with the advent of photography, so too are we re-ordering our position with regard to memory and media. Its advent in our lives is usual and so habitual that we rarely notice its relation to our personal construction of history. Memories of lived experience are mulled with the consumption of reality shows, serial dramas, newscasts, podcasts, films and YouTube, jointly constructing memories of the time, place and reality, of our lives. Each are elements of an often unconscious, but perceived physical, psychological and mnemonic space, each legitimate in our minds, as any other. 

 

In this piece I am examining the relationship between mediation and disaster, the nature of experience and the role each play in our construction of memory. The relationship of collective experience and mediation to our individual memories has shifted from that of a shared, primary or first person narrative, to that of experience relayed via mediated sources such as television and internet interfaces. This shift has allowed us to experience catastrophic events in greater depth, complexity and redundancy, allowing us to relive experiences we have never had, over and over, at our convenience.