18.4.11

Single point perspective

This is an animated model of the way I was thinking through the problems of representation in landscape, single point perspective, composition etc. When we view 'landscape' from a moving vehicle, as we often do in a modern city and its periphery, the path is fixed but perspective constantly shifts.



I'm particularly interested in on/off ramps on the city periphery as points of engagement in the highway landscape, an intersection of narrative, driving as embodiment, the shifting perspective vertically as well as horizontally and layering interweaving of elements and trajectories.

5.4.11

Castlemaine Arts Festival

The journey;



A second journey along the highway with a camera started to reveal some things for me. On/off ramps and the islands of land caught in the middle where particularly interesting. These are sometimes used as gateway monuments to towns and sometimes contain fragment of history like a few remaining exotic plantings from an old farmhouse or a convict stone wall. Maybe they function as a drainage or retention area. Mostly they are 'empty'.


Castlemaine has a 'ye olde worlde' thing going on, roots music, 'natural' products, antiques etc. This is continued in the festival aesthetic with pennyfarthings, town cryers, historic buildings as festival hubs. There is a strange sentimentality for the old and decaying but also a timelessness that urbanites especially enjoy.




The different spatial and temporal scales of a country town work in much the same way as a large urban park. The town offers most of the amenities of the city but without as structured social, spatial and temporal hierarchies. In that way the town itself acts as a liminal space for city dwellers and there is much potential in layering and reframing country towns to include a metropolitan population and programme.

Camp models revisited



I've uploaded a bunch of animations to Vimeo. Still not sure about the settings so titles didn't come up for some reason and I ran out of 'daily' upload cred although I still can't upload today. And I just realised that Blogger only does youtube so maybe I ditch Vimeo anyway.

I went back over camp models to see how I was looking at liminal space and how that may have changed. I mapped out the area that I was working in;


The field

While the animations explored the movement through a threshold space these stills looked at the focal point of a fixed point perspective. The target became the undeniable centre of the photo and everything else the periphery. Did this make that area liminal space? Not really.



I tended to put the target points at 'places' or points of interest anyway. When the target was placed in a transitional space it made it a fixed point. The last image is interesting. When there is repetition, the absence of something can become the focal point.




With my current understanding of liminal space I would have taken the central area as the liminal. It is unprogrammed, indeterminate, allows for multiple connections and congregation: "promiscuous intermingling".

Central congregation space