SPACE AS INTERFACE.
We consider design as a narrative connection between two points in space and time. Space is the medium where meanings collide, space is our interface for the experience of reality and its communication. Physical Editing describes a methodology focused on the exploration of these observations and encourages the generation of “physical creative geographies” as intersecting constructs of objects, media, film, objects, performances, etc. as dialogues or narratives propositions. Physical Editing deals with “the reality” required in the construction of fiction as a metaphor for the construction of reality.
Its focus is the exploration of the production and narrative strategies of cinema as means to stablish new perspectives in design. We are interested in all the reality necessary to produce fiction (and reality itself). You just need to have a look at any movie credits to understand the amount of work necessary in the production of narratives or realities, the difference being that in other production systems not everyone involved in these processes are credited contributing to the ‘myth of the author’. In the past we have ran projects exploring cinematic narrative devices as “Deus Ex Machina” and “Road Movie”
We use cinematic installations both to model and explore ideas around design and the representation of reality (the things we know we know, the things we know we do not know and most importantly the things we do not know we do not know)
We talk about light and shadow as our first binary code. It is thanks to understanding this relationship between light and shadow that we were first able to represent the world around us, through drawing, that we were able to understand that reality is malleable because our ow shadow tell us that… like with the little kid…
We use Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as an example of precisely this, how a model can be both the means to research and communicate the very thing you are investigating. It is also probably the first representation of cinema as we know. His allegory goes as follows: in trying to explain how we get to acquire “real or scientific” knowledge, Plato ask us to imagine a cave, where we are all prisoners. We are chained with the backs to the wall and behind us there are people who control what we see, by projecting shadow that represent reality but are not reality itself. In his model, we are both the people producing the shadows and the prisoners themselves _ the shadows represent culture “the things we think we know” and this is a comfortable place, and requires effort to escape and find the “reality within the fiction” or those “things we didn’t know we know”.
DESIGN AS AN INBETWEENER
Design is an inbetweener, it lies between things… people and nature, people and objects, people and people, objects and objects, etc. And as designers, what we do is to create these connections… we connect to distinct points in time and space A&B (& being the design). The nature of this conection is always narrative, it responds to a narrative statement: “I am hungry”…or “I want to eat but my hands are dirty”… or “I want to make food available to everyone”…etc. etc.
A simple action like eating a vegetable is a transition between A & B (A=mouth and B=food) the simplest an shortest rout is to it with your hand (A hand B = yummy). If the context changes it might be than eating with your hand is no longer an option so you need a utensil (A fork hand B=yummy). Context is always ideological and stablishes therefore an idea of what is possible, so in an a radical industrial context it might be decided that all functions are performed by machines… again the distance becomes longer (A hand machine fork B=yummy?) like Charles Chaplin ironically shows us in Modern Times.
The distance of the connection responds to how we define the connection itself: Is our design satisfy with creating a connection between A and B? or does it concerned itself with how B (food) gets to be in the possition to be eaten A (mouth)?
Understood in this way, design could be described, using cinematic terms, as a road movie. In a road movie the protagonist/s set themselves in a journey from A to B. A and B are not really important, the important thing is how this journey takes place.
PHYSICAL EDITING
Physical Editing describes the way in which we will be working.
In a movie the different shots are edited together to produce a movie. For Sergei Eisenstein there are two basic apporaches to edition or montage: One is ‘continuity’, where the edition continues and presents the action; the other is ‘conflict’, where this action is broken by the edition, introducing shots that are intended to conflict with eachother and in doing so produce new ideas in the audience.
We will be editing our films in space. So our fims will not be movies but a physical installation. In space we will favour and explore the idea of conflict, as directors we have no real control over how our audience is going to move and explore our ’film’ so the aim of our ‘films’ is not just a narrative one balso means to communicate and suggest new ideas.
Our ‘films’ will explore the intersections of media, space and objects and through this exploration we will develop new languages for design.
The results of the project will take the form of spatial installations as physical movies (Remember Plato’s Allegory of the Cave) our movies will be construct by all of that we do not see in the film (production and conceptual spaces of cinema) everything that makes experiencing a film possible.
PHYSICAL EDITING is a course ran by Roberto Feo & Rosario Hurtado (aka El Ultimo Grito) that looks at the production and conceptual spaces of cinema as vehicles for exploring the intersections of objects, space, digital media, film, performance and comics as means to developing new models for design practice.
DESIGN AS AN INBETWEENER. Design occupies the in-between spaces that exist between humans and their surrounding worlds both real and fictional, conceptually and materially connecting two distinct points in time and space.