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November 10, 2005
Spatial Design - Labyrinth
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Our recent assignment in the Spatial Design class was to build a labyrinth. Inspired by the recent class readings by Jorge Luis Borges (from the Labyrinths collection), I decided to work with words. Borges seems to be interested in how our "reality" is fluid and flexible, and always shifting, depending on our understanding of it.
I have been interested in moments of reality breakdown for some years now, and I decided to make a conceptual labyrinth, based on miscommunication. It sometimes makes for fascinating viewing in classes, when someone asks a question which is misunderstood or misheard, and a long nonsensical answer is given in response. Due to the politeness of our social conduct, the answer is rarely interrupted, and then the answer itself provides a new subject for conversation, and is questioned on its own terms and the conversation takes an entirely new and unlogical direction.
So, I am interested in the possibility for two people to take two different paths within a conversation. At first they are related, but then they become more and more distant and unrelated until they are in different conversations, but still speaking together.
Thanks to my brother, Matt Purver, I got online access to a large database of conversations recorded in England during the 90's. These conversations were recorded and transcribed as part of a project by the Logic, Language and Computation Group at King's College, London, where Matt did his PhD before going to work at Stanford. I spent some hours reading through the conversations, and especially the section which isolated moments of misunderstanding.
I selected one particular excerpt of dialogue as an example of confused communication. It's between two schoolboys in England, and I posted it on the site I made to present my ideas for my labyrinth in class, here
I evisioned two different way to structurally communicate the kind of labyrinth that I am interested in. One was an installation where at the start of the dialogue the two speakers are in the same room, the walls of which are made of a transparent material. With each misunderstanding the speakers are moved into separate adjoining rooms, so that they get further and further away as the conversation gets more confused. The walls are all thin and transparent, so they can still see and hear each other, its just that the quality of sound and vision degrades with each degree of separation, so that eventually they will only see each other as blurred shapes and hear each other as vague sounds.
The second was a room that structurally changes itself with each misunderstanding. The structure begins as a very recognisable, straightforward room, but then changes, bit by bit, into a more disorienting and unrecognisable environment. I put simple flash animations on the site to convey my thoughts in class.
Then I began to build a small model, out of transparent, slightly frosted plastic. As I built it, it started to become a three dimensional maze, with two points of entry through the same initial chamber. The two paths then run around, under and over each other, but never meet again. It could be used as a game, with ball bearings inside the labyrinth, and the object of the game is to pass both balls through the labyrinth together.
However, I didn't feel that this model was conveying the feeling of disconnection that I wanted to portray. So, I decided to make a video, to try and express the labyrinth of sound and vision that we are living in all the time. Myself and Andrew Schnieder recorded the excerpt of dialogue from the English schoolboys, and then I recorded images and sounds from around ITP and the surrounding streets. What results is a strange, dreamlike labyrinth of sound and light.
Here are some stills from the video
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Posted by edpurver at November 10, 2005 04:59 PM