EMMA – Kreativzentrum Pforzheim
VIRTUALITY, DATA AND FLOATING BODIES
2020

A series of 4 short-texts that support the studio practice for the project Nicht eine Stadt, die war. They consist of the core critical thinking taking place during the development of the idea, at Emma Kreativzentrum Designers in Residence, Pforzheim, Germany.

Medium to Object

The use of layering in space was one of an obvious attempt to highlight the virtual experience of space.
By this I mean the vast amount of impressions, of visual assumptions of beliefs we construct whilst standing in any space.

The filter, window, color block started as a way of demonstrating, and became a living organism in itself. By cutting a fabric I would open a hole to another dimensional room, a focus would be created towards a certain existing architectural element. I thought that by creating an opacity in the middle of transparency I would achieve doubt, regarding the same existing architectural element. What started as a medium became an endless stage for different and simultaneous relationships. I certainly can’t name half of them, the effects that space, light, color and position offer to an object. Specially when concentrating on spatial transparent objects that play with light and are designed through the use of colour.

This is, if not something that I wouldn’t dare find answers about, the most passionate and deep question inside me that I want to find answers about.
On my perspective a medium that turns into object of interest is because was not yet dissected by all means of knowledge.

Working with textiles as a medium to create interior space (by interior space I mean the mind, the conscious), led me to try to understand our relationship to space prior to shaping it.

About Water, Fluidity and History of a Body in a Slower-Motion - Typology of The Bad Ritual

Floating in Architecture.
Starting by mentioning the origin of this architectural typology, coming from the rituals and religious cleansing onto roman culture and lifestyle directly to ancient-embedded culture of everyday lives. These are still places where there is an aura, connected to birth somehow.

The sense of human nature being explored in this spaces, not just through the physical affecting the human body and its gravitational point being defeated, but mentally through the nakedness and the rawness of individual bodies in a public sphere. The abolition of social constructs, social norms and political divisions, that get disposed together with clothing. Concepts of gravity, ground, convictions get more diluted in this action of immersing ourselves. We simply dip, all equal. All out of our natural habitation environment. This equal relationship between bodies, informs each that one is valuable as it is blending with others. Fluidity is a chamber that’s offers access, linkage and bonding.

A body that moves on water, is one that recognizes each movement that happens. It is aware of every step and of the surrounding. We become aware of our presence and that roots us down to our very own body dynamic as a contrast to the space and non space around us.

Noise canceling, fluid matter surrounding us, eyes closed, a pause. This pause on breathing... makes time disappear, it is some other way of passing through time.

Time moves slow under water. We pause.

About Emptiness and Celebration - Pforzheim the City of Memory

To celebrate what is empty is not to fill it.
Filling is a reductive action, the one of fixing, by means of functional just adding something to something that had something else exactly there previously is a way of denying space and its own melancholy, vibrance and loud presence.

Somehow empty rooms, empty divisions in architecture drive us in to a memory record, it indicates rather a fictional narrative instead of an active one. In photography this is a big example of story telling. The lack of information on context, the emptiness, the action of something being filled with nothing is an open door to memory, mystery and nostalgia driven interpretations.

To celebrate emptiness consists on creating new with none.
The non-existence of something is an opportunity for raising. A hole has already enough loss in it. By filling up a whole we enhance its memory of loss and fix it. Simple fix it.

But enhancing the hole with a structure that resists this emptiness, the defining edges of the hole itself is one that is raised from the dead is one that speaks of rebirth. It speaks of newness and regeneration, healing, blossoming, and all the things that a city of the post-war needs to be surrounded by. Not the erasing of memory, not the fixing of memory but the optimistic celebration of memories.

Rising up new outlooks of certain memories is thought through as a way of keeping the mind connected to the things that form a culture a society, about the past happenings of this society and thus a way of making decisions of today more conscious.

There are cities where memory plays rather a main role. A city like Pforzheim destroyed catastrophically twice in history is a city where construction is seen in a different way. Is a city thought off, as a non-attachment city, made of cheap materials mainly, and out-of-ordinary designs. The placement of one’s body in this city is more external than in a city where it is possible to sense our ancestral civilization’s footsteps on the road’s pavement.

But it is this that makes Pforzheim so special its known history and the rising up of newness in these strategically placed piece of land. Construction here is thought as an opportunity to demolish the old and rise more newness.

But even though phenomena like, the earthquake or the allies bombing, where taking place here and therefore destroyed the life and subsequently the memo of the following ones, The previous architecture, spatial culture and partially destroyed sites should be maintained and celebrated. This leads the strain of thought back to why? So that Pforzheim inhabitants in the future, a future of less choice, more regulated structures can relate to a speech about the city identity alongside feeling identified themselves with the city.

The Virtual in Realité

In one of my texts I reflect on how textiles are to me one of the most spiritual and bodily experiences. How they enrich our interior self and inform oneself about the outside world simultaneously. In this duality we always find answers. It is from duality that value is born, and selection needs to happen. From this selective moments we gain experience, we learn about ourselves. It is from value that realities reach their most Nobel and palpable sense of existence. So to speak of virtual reality, and its non palpable but enhanced nature.

The two worlds, both virtual and real, are naturally confined within the same concept, and linguistics really don’t achieve its accurate meanings. Because words are not enough to describe such vast and subjective contexts. Perhaps materiality can help. The power of written language and material language can support one another on this matter.

As Anish Kapoor says, and in my opinion, very reflectively: “the problem is not the ‘virtual’ it is the ‘reality’ that is really another thing.”

Reality is the one that drives us into existential questions. The human eye and its sense of perception is so subjective and variable that we don’t know exactly what, and to what extent we can call things real or not.

Virtual is the one thing that exists extensively everywhere. In whatever form it takes shape for those who are natural observants. It is noticeable in nature, in the form of light and smoke. It is present in the air waves underneath bird’s flapping wings. Virtuality is present in everything that is in between the sunlight and the ground. A Sunstroke on a polished surface and a reflection of dots on a wall. Virtuality is what creates fire.

Fire. Ah here its is a good one. Can fire be an after effect of virtual reality?
After all, we have invented methods of starting Fire; like we have created photography; the mother of virtual reality (not from a physicist perspective although through the eye of the discoverer, the one that finds out something unknown and enquires about its extended future usage).

Going back to the idea of reality and its misunderstood static state. Any small change in the daily environmental will make us hesitate. Like the architecture theorist Mark Winglet stated: “when we hesitate, a chain of actions, of thoughts and aspirations is triggered.” Those hesitations thus, might lead to “questionings” make us more aware of surroundings and of our existence. Therefore they are elements that push our human reality.

What is, this unreachable reality, like the VR (due to its non physical association)? It can offer a change to a daily environment and make us hesitate. Is it comparable to a fire? A reality we can’t co-exist in but we can see? This two, become valuable concepts to humanity (function mixed with faith, perception, I guess).

Not all inventions have this valuable connotation because some, make us fat, make us seat down and be consumed. Others, like VR makes us be active, question and aspire.

VR is a medium, it is a tool to visualize and to imagine that allows human creativity to take the lead. It only exists because we doubted. Since VR is a medium, an object - thing and a rendering all in one. Something provides with the not so crazy link between VR and textiles. A medium, A thing and a Rendering. The digital world itself is composed of a network, patterns, weaving systems. Creating a structure, a network of crossed elements, crossed happenings, crossed perceptions, is without doubt an action that makes oneself search for basis and communal. It is subjectivity in the end leading to tolerance.

So if we develop and ultimate reaction or relationship towards or with VR as we do towards transparent Textile windows, can both be considered to be attempting to say the same thing? Or explore similar concepts towards the human body or related experience?