ADS12: Sight/Seeing

As a continuation from last year we’re again concerned with our “sensibilities to discern within massive change”. In place of “Chronocopia”—or the way we characterise time(s)—this year the conspicuity of the “Image” has been on trial. In “Sight/Seeing” we have again been engaging with massive banks of images to tackle the problem of the prevailing architectural image as indistinguishable from visual ad-copy, and the indifferent technical infrastructures that make them. We have been learning that each prolonged stare, each fixation on something is a moment when we are working—“to look is to labour” (Beller)—and ultimately is Self-forming. Then, as a mechanism of preservation we have developed a group capacity for repulsion: why can one person stomach something that another cannot? We have speculated on whether our peers and the community is indeed exhausted from overexposure: what it means when the same images are reproduced over and over again until their “intimacy is inevitably compromised” (Kotz).

As we shift towards the architectural image as the primary carrier of the architectural idea, the projects completed in Sight/Seeing have gone beyond the “two-dimensionality” of a single image, to trace their “poly-directionality” of histories. The image has then formed the basis of the architectural project as opposed to deployed a convenient conclusion; projects made not from what images show, but what they evoke.

Convened Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds of Pa.LaC.E, High Holdings' regular activities are mirrored on the website: http://ho.ldin.gs/

Benjamin Reynolds and Valle Medina