Instructors: Amber Bartosh & Shumi Bose
Date: Spring 2024
Collaborators: Joyce Lin, Alison Luo, Sweni Prajapati
The layers of London are not simply temporal or vertical - they float and shift through reference frames and frameworks, projecting geological eras onto vertical surfaces and virtual swarms onto the urban fabric. It is our job, then, through analysis, to start to tease apart these balls of information, unraveling their string into drawings and narratives. This is no easy task. What London offers then is experience - that domain of representation which is not abstracted and not confined to rasterization or vectorization - it is the world unfiltered (obviously filtered through the senses, but what can you do). As such, this semester’s project has not been a computational farm in Highgate or an essay on public space or a sketchbook or a commonplace book on the Tube’s escalator - the project has been an intensive study of the experience of the city - a means of incorporating the transcendent into the fixed, the experience into the mathematical.
A collection of contemporary perspectives operates as the non-linear layering which my studies and experiences suggest. They operate independently, united through a common subject and common space. Space forms the container for these thoughts, dreams, aspirations, and ultimately, analysis. They are united through the process of making - designed, constructed, felt. The ‘zine is an object, it is physical, non-raster, non-vector, and forms a surface onto which our experiences as a group are projected. Typology, use, technology, and occupation come together to form an idea of building and space. They are not confined to the bounds of the buildings as physical objects, but operate through language, image, and drawing between the layers of socio-econo-physio-culturo-space. The ‘zine is the building, the building is the ‘zine, and all are possible not through lecture, book, or video, but only through the direct experience present in each second of my term abroad.
