Inflagrante Delicto

We will be running a workshop entitled 'Inflagrante Delicto: A Story of Architecture, Sex and Death' for Masters students at the Aarhus School of Architecture from 10th September-14th September. The workshop, including 280 students, will explore the relationship between architecture & narrative, both theoretically and practically; reflect this relationship directly – even literally – through architectural construction; document this relationship through filmic strategies.

The workshop will conclude with a film screening and banquet on Friday, 14th September.

Sideways Lecture at Danish Academy of Fine Art

Hyperspace, Sensorium, Connectivity, War... 
A Lecture with interruptions

On 13th April we will deliver a lecture as part of the Sideways Lecture series at the Danish Academy of Fine Art.  

The lecture takes as its starting point the Westin Bonaventure Hotel designed by architect John Portman in 1974. Nested in the heart of Los Angeles, this ‘city within a city’ was infamously interpreted by pre-eminent Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson as a model of postmodern hyperspace and an allegory for the logic of late capital. From this beginning, the lecture will move through the following topics: The Bonaventure Hotel / LA Tapped / Moon Landing / Falling / Bas Jan Ader / Pruitt Igoe / 104 Kilotonne Idea / Whitie on the Moon / WTC / Starship Enterprise / Donna Summer / Bunker Archeology / Dedalus-Icarus / Star Wars / Michael Herr’s Dispatches / Kyoto Station / John Portman / O Superman (For Massenet) / Strategic Defense Initiative / The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism / Ronald Reagan / Wings of Desire / Video Shakkei / The Angel of History / Fight the Power / Terror Paranoia / Satanic Verses / Cell / Falling Man / Basinski’s Disintegration Loops / Iraq War I + II / Parhessia / Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others / Arnold Schwarzenegger / Shock & Awe / Butler’s Frames of War etc…

Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture
Copenhagen, Denmark
17:00 - 18:30 13 April 2012

It was and it was not ...

"Fang, let us say, has a secret: a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him.  Naturally, there are several outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth.  In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings.” – Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’

We will be running a workshop from 9th April - 17th April with students  studying architecture at the Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen. Entitled 'It was and it was not ...', the workshop's aim is to explore the generative possibilities inherent in fiction for the material practice of architecture. We take as our starting point the understanding that fiction is an immaterial imaginary overlay rendered through a representational framework, and we are particularly interested in how architecture students might explore and exploit these generative possibilities through the technique of composite drawing.

We will conclude the workshop with a final review of the students' work.

'To forget: Of Air' at Sexuate Subjects Conference

At the start of December we will be taking part in an international interdisciplinary conference entitled Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics at University College London. For the the panel Understanding Difference: Why Poetry Matters we will present  'Time, Space and Empathy: A Material Poetics of the Film Image' in which we explore how a viewer's relationship to the screen constructs a dialogical space: an intersubjective space of 'shared viewing' and 'shared experience'; a meaningful space of imagination, cognition and feeling; an embodied space where mediation, itself, becomes an object of contemplation.

As part of our presentation will also show video piece entitled 'To forget : Of air', which gathers together footage shot at the Santa Catarina Pool in Bagno Vignoni, Italy – the original location for the penultimate scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). 

Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics
Friday 3rd to Sunday 5th December 2010
UCL, London

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sexuate-subjects

Post-Performance Drawings in Melbourne

Drawing related to Video Shakkei performance at Awaji Water Temple.

We have been invited by the International Centre for Drawing at RMIT Melbourne to produce a number of large-scale drawing works as part of the Drawing Out festival and conference in Melbourne, Australia, from 7th-9th April. For the exhibition we will generate a number of 'post-performance' drawings relating to Video Shakkei, specifically, and relating generally to our process and practice of site-specific performance and time-based drawing throughout the project.  There will be five drawings in total, each drawn directly onto a wall panel of approximately 3m x 5m and interlinked in a vertically ascending space. 

The drawings will be exhibited at RMIT Melbourne for six weeks.

Event-Space, Performance and Time-Based Media at Drawing Out Conference

Still of video composite for Video Shakkei.

Reflecting on our practice and process throughout Video Shakkei we will present 'Video Shakkei: Event-Space, Performance and Time-Based Drawing' at the Drawing Out Conference at RMIT in Melbourne Australia (7-10 April). The paper explores the nature of the ‘captured’ architectural drawing and, in doing so, proposing a relationship between architectural site, performative action and time-based drawing. 

Drawing Out Conference
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
7th – 9th April 2010

http://www.drawingout.com.au/

Memento Mori in Performance Research

Over the past number of years we have worked on projects in Japan (Video Shakkei), Italy (Gorchakov's Wish) and Ireland (Eight Rooms).  During our visits to each of these locations we have often stopped to engage with places of cultural and spiritual significance including holy wells, cemetaries and burial sites - an act of observation, perhaps contemplation. Relating to this experience, we have just published 'Memento Mori' as a sequence of artists' pages in the latest edition of Performance Research (Volume 15:1) on Memento Mori.

The sequence is a a composite of word-and-image. The images are photographs taken at the following locations:

• Isola di San Michele (‘Island of the Dead’) in Venice, Italy
• Daigh Bhríde (St. Brigid’s Well) in Liscannor, County Clare, Ireland
• A burial site in Tenryu-ji (天龍寺) in Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, Japan

The text, some of which is comprised of found materials from the specific locations, is a poetic meditation on death and remembrance.  

Video Shakkei at The Centre for Drawing, London

Culminating our residency in The Project Space at The Centre for Drawing we will present Video Shakkei in the form of an installation work.  The work incorporates video compositions relating to seven of our fourteen performances in Japan, as well as materials generated during our residency, reflecting on this experience.  The resulting environment of image, object and text opens up the system of features we are calling 'our' Japan to a viewer's enactment and interpretation.  

Drawing from the Japanese practice of shakkei, or ‘borrowed landscape,’ artists Kreider + O’Leary engage with a number of sites in Japan - from ancient Shinto spaces of ritual in Ise to the futuristic Umeda Sky building in Osaka - to perform a series of sequenced actions or ‘live drawings.’ These actions are recorded simultaneously from differing points of view using high definition video as well as recently developed embedded miniature video camera technology. Edited together in series of filmic composites modeled on the multi-scaled architectural drawing, the recordings relate architectural space - to performed event - to narrative sequence. The result is a hyper-digitized, absurdly choreographed and poetically rendered image of place.

Private view : Thursday 3rd September 2009 6pm - 9pm
Exhibition : Friday 4th Sept - Thursday 1st Oct 2009 

Viewing by appointment : Contact Claire Foss 020 7514 9706

The Centre for Drawing Project Space 
Wimbledon College of Art
The University of the Arts London 
Merton Hall Road, London SW19 3QA

Artists Residency in The Project Space

'If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object ... I can also - though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) - isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed by linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system.  It is this system which I shall call: Japan.'
- Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs.

We will be working as artists-in-residence in The Project Space at The Centre for Drawing throughout the month of August. We will use this time to take stock of our recent trip to Japan, where we visited a number of carefully selected sites in Japan – from ancient Shinto spaces of ritual in Ise to the hyper-futuristic Umeda Sky building in Osaka – to perform a sequence of actions or ‘live drawings’ in response to the spatial and material qualities of each location. These actions were recorded simultaneously from differing points of view using two hand-held and two miniature high definition video cameras. This experience and our response to it throughout the residency will culminate in an exhibition at the start of September.

Constructing Atmospheres at Architecture and Phenomenology Conference

Drawing together preliminary findings from our research into Tarkovsky's film-image, we will present a paper entitled 'Constructing Atmospheres: A Phenomenology of the Film Image and its Relation to Place' for the Architecture and Phenomenology, Second International Conference at Kyoto Seika University, Japan (26-29 June, 2009) .  The paper focuses explicitly on the phenomenological relationship between the film-image and worldly place. The following is extracted from the conference paper abstract:

Tarkovsky theorises the film-image in particular relation to time. In this paper we position his argument in relation to discussions in phenomenology and film-theory to suggest that, imbued with a sense of time, the film-image also gives rise to a corporeal understanding of place for both the film-maker and recipient of the film- image – and we liken this embodied act of cognition to one engendered by certain architectural experiences. We then turn to a specific scene from Nostalghia in order to appreciate that the film-image is, in fact, a ‘constructed atmosphere’: one that bears a naturalistic and poetic – material and symbolic – relation to place; one that therefore cultivates and embodied and imagined occupation of place.