> = < (convergent – parallel – divergent): 110512

Examples of the braided landscapes. Go here for a slideshow of more models and here for the handout that introduced this exercise.

Sol Ok, Jenny Rong, Girolamo Carollo, Abraham Dreazen

studio description......................

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Garden of Forking Paths proposes a model for the world composed of multiple splitting strands. In the story, temporal strands form “a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.” This notion of convergent, parallel, and divergent strands served as a model for spatial explorations in the studio. Work began along two parallel tracks: a modeling exercise based on cutting extruded wood molding profiles and re-assembling them into strands with variable curvature, and a mapping exercise studying the organization of a braided river. Together, these exercises led toward building a braided field of strands.

Once braided, strands produced a landscape of nascent surfaces and quasi-interiorities. When viewed in terms of site / intervention or landscape / inhabitant, these surfaces and interiorities were seen to have effective and affective potentials. As described by John Rajchman, effective potentials are grounding; constructed qualities of surface, enclosure, and atmosphere suggest a level of stability in the earth. Affective potentials are ungrounding; they suggest open-ended trajectories of bodies in space. As such, landscape and intervention operated in concert to produce effect and affect in strands of space and time. Final spatial propositions were not attempts to insert movements or narratives into a preformed framework, but sought to release figures from this type of prescription and allow them to navigate alternative paths.

> = < (convergent – parallel – divergent)

110512 - braided landscapes

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