liminopia

liminopia and critical practice - part one

2010-05-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

TangentProjects was delighted to take part in the recent Critical Practice event, Parade: Public Modes of Assembly and Forms of Address as part of the Market of Ideas segment on Sunday 23 May 2010.

We used our recent work with Liminopia as the trajectory to host a series of informal discussions with invited guests from the art, design and architecture industries, as well as the Market of Ideas audience. The brief we gave was simple:

‘Liminopia’ is a fantasy cityscape in miniature, constructed from found materials by TangentProjects over a period of 5 months. More than a physical piece of work, Liminopia has become both a meditation on acts of collaboration between the three artists and an investigation into the nature of construction, planning and social inclusion and exclusion as experienced through the structures of our cities.   

Using a plan of the Liminopia cityscape as a focal point, TangentProjects would like to engage in an informal discussion with a panel of invited guests and members of the visiting public during today’s Market of Ideas event. The aim of this informal discussion is to explore various ideas generated from Liminopia’s creation rather than Liminopia itself. Possible topics to explore are the notion of publicness and how it influences our perception of the built environment, the idea of collaboration and how we interpret, are influenced by and navigate our own urban landscape.   

The discussions that ensue will be recorded as a part of the Liminopia project and all participants are invited to contribute to the discussion as little or as much as they see fit, as well as annotate or draw on the plan itself should they wish to.

The resulting discussions were filmed and will be uploaded to our website in segments once the editing is done. Meanwhile, here's a taster, courtesy of &&& Creative and Helene Kazan as well as a bit of background to that clip:

Sunday, 23 May 2010, saw the Parade courtyard at Chelsea College of Art occupied by a large structure made entirely out of milk crates to house Market of Ideas, as part of the weekend long Parade event organised by Critical Practice. TangentProjects, one of the 'stall holders', invited &&& Creative to join their day long discussion on notions of creative collaboration, the urban landscape and ideas of publicness. Helene Kazan interviewed Simon Brown, Shawn Davey and Lucas Krull individually about their own practices and collectively as &&& Creative.

mapping liminopia

2010-05-11T04:42:00.000-07:00

a composite of liminopia pieced together from 'aerial' photograph:

composite with overlay:

drawing the plan:

liminopia - selected images

2010-04-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

liminopia - march 2010

facing the front of liminopia, shanty town in foreground - march 2010

aeriel shot - march 2010

aeriel shot - wasteland/factory/council estate/river - march 2010

aeriel shot - shantytown - march 2010

liminopia apartments - march 2010

liminopia at dusk - march 2010

aerial shot - monolith (centre) toxic waste dump (left), green belt (back left) urban dwellings (back right) financial district (right) - march 2010

fun fair - march 2010

monoleith detail - march 2010

night scape - march 2010

invented waterways - march 2010

From the Ruins of Liminopia

2010-03-25T06:05:00.000-07:00

Liminopia was a fantasy, a model urban landscape free from constraints of scale constructed of random materials found by chance. It was a series of spatial contradictions, emanating from the Travellers Box which in this incarnation, turned upside down, issued forth from a hilltop an expanding city from the imaginations of the three artist/architects. The dialogues between the architects of this city came more through the internal preconceptions of urban planning, architecture, landscape and the material structure of the urban environment. We embarked on the project with notions of collaboration through conversation, dialogue, dissent and negotiation to construct a city of our choosing only to find that the preconceptions controlled and led us to construct from almost subconscious dialogue with the found materials. Ultimately despite the measured placings of each of the sites that made up the city in its entirety Liminopia in many ways made itself, perhaps less so for the other two architects but for me represents the life of a city which pervades our consciousness, suggests behaviours and subtly subverts and alters our own wishes for the immediate world around us. We are directed not only by our own motivations and the agendas of those who have more power over our cities, and therefore us, but also by our urban world which absorbs all the differing agendas, assumptions, hopes and wishes of its inhabitants and emits these back again in silent and unseen combinations.

Liminopia never had a history, it's (assumed) inhabitants never spoke, it never created an infrastructure that we recognise in our real cities that would enable it to live. Now that it is demolished and its heart, the Travellers Box, has moved on to its next incarnation, we can begin to discuss and decipher the ideas it suggests to us back in the real world. The documentation of its existence can now be created, interpreted and used to create a dialogue and conversation between the three architects to determine what this process of collaboration but also perhaps a wider understanding of the urban environment we share means to us and our fellow city dwellers. SS

a well earned beer

2010-03-18T01:50:00.000-07:00

steve, helene & karen relaxing after the final shoot

the marks of time

2010-03-18T01:40:00.000-07:00

as we begin to dismantle the mini metropolis that has become such a part of our lives, and, quite frankly, has dominated the studio for the past 6 months, and send the box on it's way to focAR group, it's time to reflect a bit. for me, one of the most interesting things about this collaboration has been the organic way it has unfolded and the parallels with building structures in the real world. unforeseen problems arise and decisions have to be taken. for instance, there was a time in the beginning where i really felt attached to the idea of protecting the structures from outside elements. the first heavy rain put paid to that and gave some areas of our 'city' a battering. we took the decision to leave the marks rather than make it pristine and it felt quite natural to do that. after all, when one builds a structure in the real world, it does rain and things get wet. admittedly, in the real world, damage would be addressed, but in our case, we felt the marks left represented traces of time elapsing and of the reality of dealing with the elements, even in our fantasy metropolis.

aerial shot before the rain

aerial shot after the rain...

another interesting thing is the notion of scale. in the real world, scale, measurements and balance, both aesthetically and practically, are rather important. and those things were important to us, at least we assumed this in the beginning. but when it came to creating this space, the notion of scale went right out the window, and, it has to be said, rather quickly. the choice to use found materials dictated the scale, or lack of, and i think that added an element of sheer fantasy and impossibility that was in keeping with the idea of 'liminopia'. --ka

manipulating reality

2009-11-16T06:07:00.000-08:00

KA. It's increasingly become apparent that creating Liminopia is impacted and influenced by its greater environment, namely the studio in which it resides. These images are attempts to alleviate those outward distractions, in order to play with and explore ideas that are at the moment, only visible in the imagination. A bit of photographic intervention has been used to create an illusion of 'sky', giving forth the possibility of Liminopia being an actual environment in and of itself. While manufactured and manipulated, it's interesting to see and consider how these photographic interventions can open up new ideas and create different contexts.

Covering the surface

2009-11-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

Conversation 1

2009-11-02T06:46:00.000-08:00

SS. The current work in progress on Liminopia has sites of development which are gradually creating further developments radiating out from the initial buildings into larger sites of urban activity. Gaps are filling in and the landscape is being covered, however some areas are already creating zones at which the adjacent areas are difficult to build on. One of the major areas at which this condition exists is the industrial zone with a factory and its associated toxic environment. Although one of the early developments the adjacent land remains unused and it might be suggested that our usual discomfort at being near such developments in the real urban world is being replicated in our imagined world of Liminopia. In what is a our own controlled world of Liminopia why do we still replicate these sites of alienation and how might we respond to mediate this area and how might this process in Liminopia be tranferred to ideas responding positively to the redevelopment and re-engagement of such zones in our own real city of London?

planning permission requested

2009-10-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

liminopia gets a fun fair

2009-10-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

more items to be added, of course.

Liminopia's origin.

2009-10-20T02:33:00.000-07:00

One might think that given the freedom to imagine an urban environment, free from the normal constraints that living in a collective environment or society imposes, it would allow our minds to imagine the best urban situations and architectural solutions. Freed from constraints of negotiation and planning processes we might imagine a world in an idealised appearance, all the best things we hope for in the style and structure of an urban world we would build around us, a city to serve us in all the most positive ways. However it would seem that the structure of our real cities and towns with all their movements through industrialisation, modernism and globalisation has in many ways internalised in our thoughts so deeply that our sense of a pure and untouched Utopia cannot even be imagined purely without the oppressive and unloved manifestations of the urban environment informing our view. We intend or expect to create a Utopia but as materials are collected and manifest in our view of this imagined cityscape we manufacture not only places of leisure, enjoyment and architectural purity but sites of industrial might and economic power almost alienating in their size and power, industrial wastelands that appear in the final throes of usefulness and wasted and scorched forests encroached on by our city and left to dry and decay, in any ones eyes a Dystopia.

And that is where we are, between states, neither a Utopia or Dystopia but a landscape that is both at the same time or something between. An environment between these states, from our imaginings of an urban world both postive and negative, a Liminopia..... The Liminopia.

construction site

2009-09-29T07:52:00.001-07:00

playing with scale, within the framework of an image

2009-09-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

new elements

2009-09-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to see the sorts of objects being used, how we manipulate them and so on. Things like texture, scale, surface and shape are being thought about... talked about... considered. Lighting is another issue we have discussed and want to incorporate.

urban sprawl

2009-09-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

territory

2009-09-28T07:29:00.000-07:00

As a group of three, we’re used to negotiating territory within the context of putting together events or shows, but this is the first time we have collaborated on constructing an actual piece of work.

It’s whole different kettle of fish…

Having established the overall territory of the work (the tarp as boundary) we set about placing various objects we’d collected, playing with the space and getting a feel for the potential of the project as a whole. It was interesting (but hardly surprising) that each of us chose an area that wasn’t directly next to another’s ‘work’, and already we were each very aware of ‘boundary’ ‘territory’ and ‘ownership’. It also quickly became evident that, while not wanting to constrain each others’ ideas, some sort of structure needed to be agreed before we could really crack on. So:

We agreed that it was likely that a large part of what would be constructed would evolve from found objects, but that we weren’t limited to this.

We quickly abandoned any notion of ‘relative scale’, and decided to let the work unfold organically to see where it was going. If we found that we wanted negotiate things like scale, placement, use of materials etc. during that process then we would, but the overall feeling was to have this ‘metropolis’ unfold organically and reactively rather than be mapped out beforehand.

We talked a lot about territory, and what that meant, particularly in the context of ownership of the work. Who owns this? Is it the sum of its parts or do we each have a claim to the bits we do? Is that important? Are we going to become territorial? And if so how will we resolve any potential conflict? What happens when one person constructs something and another doesn’t like it or thinks it encroaches on something they have already placed? Or, what if someone wants to demolish or change an existing ‘area’ altogether? How is this negotiated?

We agreed to incorporate an urban planning strategy, whereby ‘planning permission’ would have to be sought and approved regarding changing existing work. But even this can be a stumbling block since we aren’t always in the studio at the same time and issues can’t be resolved immediately. But it makes it interesting in that this process mirrors reality in a way; planning permission in ‘the real world’ is never an immediate process. So the waiting and negotiation becomes a part of the unfolding of the work. It’s also another means of documenting the very real process of collaboration.

We haven’t put forward any applications yet, although a piece of work was accidentally demolished, but has since been reconstructed.

work begins

2009-09-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

We decided to use the tarp as our base for sort of metropolis with the box as the central point and everything unfolding around it.

Backstory

2009-09-28T04:44:00.000-07:00

Our involvement with this project has been a somewhat long and winding road, with many twists and turns, false starts and a lot of questions being raised. Here's a bit of background:

We began by having a series of discussions about the project itself, what we thought it meant to us, how it connected with our individual art practices and with TangentProjects overall. Our initial proposal, made earlier in the year, was based on what was then known as the ‘Sandwich Box Project’, and is outlined below. Initially, we were to work within the framework of The Sandwich Box, and in some ways found it problematic, as the tent aspect never seemed to connect with us. When the project evolved into The Travellers Box and that aspect was removed, we found it a lot easier to engage with the project and things began to fall into place.

Initial Proposal

Using the text of TSB, “The intention of the Sandwich Box is to challenge or make visible elements of intimate spaces and to make opportunity for direct dialogue and activity about intimate spaces” as our trajectory, we would like to explore this idea over a six month period. Although our plan at the moment is to explore the initial concept outlined above, there is every possibility it will change and evolve into something entirely different. Ideas grow out of ideas, after all, and the collaborative process is itself a series of unfolding - of ideas, exchange of ideas and negotiation.

Whatever the overall outcome, the collaborative process itself will be documented. We see this unfolding as a piece of work in its own right, and specifically in relation to TSB, it is more about the journey than the destination.

Framework

The Box -  While keeping our ideas open and flexible, we plan to base our starting point on the box ‘object’ itself. Using the box ‘object’ as a physical manifestation of a building or dwelling, we propose to invent a series of dwellings / buildings, some of which will be actually physically made (models, in scale with the box) and others of which will be drawings, possibly of imaginary structures / dwellings / buildings which would be impossible to make in the physical world.

The Models -  Some of the models have the possibility of being constructed from found objects and materials, while others might be scale models constructed out of lightweight wood or similar. The idea of crossover between fantasy and reality is interesting to us, as is the idea of using found objects as metaphors for other ideas.

The Drawings - The drawings might speak of imagination and the secrets of the mind. They might represent what cannot be articulated in the physical world yet are real and valid nonetheless. In one sense, the drawings can also reference the notion of ‘intimacy’ because they are by their very nature, physical manifestations of the intimate reflections of one’s imagination and how limitless that is.

TangentProjects and the Travellers Box Project

2009-09-25T01:49:00.000-07:00

Liminopia has been set up to document, describe and discuss the process of TangentProjects' work with the Travellers Box, an international, collaborative project begun by Danish artist Lars Vilhelmsen in 2004.

We aim to use this virtual space as a platform whereby the three of us can discuss our thoughts and experiences with the project as well as upload images and perhaps pose questions about the project as a whole and our collaborative process specifically. So in it's purest sense, this is a form of raw documentation, and within that, as our work with the project unfolds, a dialogue of sorts will emerge.

Information about the project and its background can be found on the Travellers Box website and information about us can be found on the TangentProjects website.

Welcome to Liminopia...