Narrative and Scale

I've talked a little bit about the relativity of scale in my own work while sharing the Florida coast mapping and its relationship to my exploratory thesis collages. The collages deconstruct an existing photographic image into an operative surface rather than an object. This new surface hopes to investigate basic structure and measure that might inform occupiablility. Scale can be entirely arbitrary. The collages that investigate surface are entirely augmented when inserted into the Florida mapping. Understanding their scale is only possible relative to their context. 

Excerpt from Towards Immeasurability of Art and Life by Miya Yoshida:


Unit Situational: Institutionalizing Measurement - The unit situational visually presents how the notion of measurement can be expanded - and how it can shift the location of accuracy. It proposes re-imagining measurement, and represents a counter-approach to the rigidity previously asserted; it gives more space to the concept of unit as well as to that of numbers in order to show the various possible dimensions of measurement. Situations make the concept!" [PG 71]

I just showed my undergraduate Design 1 students the Powers of 10 video to help understand fundamental field making in architecture. They just started a project called Matrix that investigates the relationship of edges and field conditions outside of the objects they make. The thing they are making is an interpretation of the geometry that starts to shape the stretch of campus between the Fine Arts building and Library West. These collages focus less of the object and more on systems of measurement, hard edge versus soft edge, height, width and registration. The idea is that these studies exist as part of larger (ultimately infinite) fabric of systems. This analysis operates in a similar way to language. The three major components of language are form, content, and use. Form involves three sub-components of syntax, morphology, and phonology. Narrative can exist in infinite variations, but the components that build it are always the same. 

[2][3][4] [Richard Serra]

“Before, there was no way of discerning where anything was in relation to 

where you were, because you had no point of reference. What that piece 

does is give you a point of reference in relationship to a line, and your 

upstanding relationship to a vertical plane, and infinity, and a personal 

relationship to a context." 

[Richard Serra in an interview with Sholto Byrnes for the Independent] 

This quote from Richard Serra ties back into Stewart's On Longing. [PG 71] "The gigantic becomes an explanation for the environment, a figure on the interface between the natural and the human." This chapter talks a great deal about understanding the gigantic through (human mark on) landscape (more specifically sky). I'm curious to discuss Stewart's ideas on literal versus figurative distance between subject and audience.