THE ELEPHANT COAT – MORE THAN A TABLE

This table from the manor house is changing with the viewer over time. It is a ordinary table for most people, when someone view it with “passion”, it becomes something else: growing from woods, shaping to cybernetic basket, unfolding to a changing coat for an elephant that escaping from the ocean prison where live the dolphins whose tail is tie to a kite. The table changes so fast that the one who treats it differently tries very hard to chase the shadow and managing to save this eerier sensation.


This elephant coat questions the hidden geometry of the “table” to every viewer: it is here but you don’t see it that way, it is not here but you still where it was, it changes to a coat and still you recognize it was a table which shadow has a spider net shape…so on and so forth.

7th week -- Running table

This running table deals with the movement of the table in the manor house. The table is moved form place to place, the table cloth casts the activity of people who's using the table as well as the objects that moves on it, and the objects on the table are being moved around, ups and downs.

How does the running table deals with deja vu and architecture then?

Things change over time, they come and go with different speed and position and even shape, the geometry they form overtime is remember by whom have been with them. So when they are extracted from a specific time point, the geometry they create will trigger you of things that happened before.

Thus this table is the joints of different positions of table (3rd picture), table cloth (4th picture), and objects on the table (5th picture).

6th week -- Weaving machine

This weaving machine weavs elements like window, door, etc. to new thing, and still you can recognize it was a window/door -- that deals with familiary-- I've seen that before somewhere or other...

5th week (2) -- speed

Last week's drawing showed that my project is dealing with different speed. And my tutor suggested that my house can be atteched to a kite~ So I wonder the video taken form a flying kite would be very interesting. Because it would capture image with different speed as the kite is blowed by the wind which is unstable. Therefore, I came up with an idea, atteching my small camera to a simple hot air balloon (shown in upper photo). Unfortunately, it couldn't work....

But I managed to captured something with lifting my camera that was put in a simple basket. The last two frames show the movement of the basket when I rolled it down from my window and lifted it up. It spinned faster as the distance was longer, getting dizzy images.

5th week (1)-- Reread

Continue with last week's collage, but this time, like a chaos.

Try to seperate the objects and rearrange them: the objects move around the room or change over time, and still will remind you of the early experience.

4th week--My manor house, past life experience

The drawing (up) was created on the bases of pictures that I had taken in China (down), forming a imaginary "manor house in my mind".

The aim is to present the site with a Deja vu experience -- I feel like I've been there before. This experience relates to one's past life which I used my photos to represent my memory.

Followings are the answers to my tutor's question:

Question:
How do you decide to connect them together?
What are the rules?

THE ELEMENTS
The function of a space is sometimes made by the things within it, e.g. furniture and decoration.

To create domestic room that has a window (that light the house, there is no the concept of DIM without the LIGHT, what is cover by the light is the focus of the whole drawing, the window is a connection of outdoor and indoor space, and the connection of outside and inside thinking), a fireplace (the symbol of climate, and usually become the center of a room that a place for gathering and chatting, an active space), a large mirror (it can express the scene outside the frame, behind the viewer, revealing something that’s hidden), paintings (paintings, especially portraits, represent the western’s lifestyle and value, painting is a way to express personal style and interests, and painters and arts are highly respected for that period of time, particularly in the upper society, only those who were not worried about food could afford the mental consumption. The content of the painting can also reveal the social status of the owner to the space.), a door (a door suggests another space behind it, a half-opened door distract the attention, attracting the desire to peep to the background scale), a desk/table by the window (it is like a platform that another major symbol of mass activities in a domestic room, the image of a poet/writer is always working by the desk, the desk is the work place that represent productivity, and therefore becomes covered by the light – a space highlighted), a person (it might be a writer, facing the window, looking to the outside world, it’s not facing the viewer so it’s attitude towards this room cannot be read by facial expression, the viewer can only guess and feel through the position and gesture of the sitting person. Exposing to the light from the window and the long shadow, the person becomes the user of the space), decorations (they are the trace of human activities; the style of decorations represents certain time that they belong to).

THE ATMOSPHERE
a dim space with light brightening certain part of the room

The fireplace is not at the center of the drawing and no one is around it, the main character sits against it, creating a sense of loneliness.

The half-opened door attracts the desire to peep to the darkness and the unknown. The peeping boy behind the door, on the contrary, wants to see what’s inside, a space that’s different from where he stands. The boy is hidden in the darkness, creating a sense of loneliness and haunted atmosphere.

What was the context?

See, be seen and unseen;
Time and activity;
Stillness, movement and moment;
Inner and outer

How do you know the work is an inquiry to something?
What is the next photograph in this series?
How does that work?
What are the changes?
How do you identify the changes?

REREAD

1. Replace with other thing that makes people has related thinking, e.g. replace a fireplace with a chimney?

2. Move the items to new places; rearrange them, maybe with or without certain rule.

3. adding the speed element, add the movement to the room, implicating the activity in the space.

Now, I think, the drawing is like my fecsimile of Vermeer's paintings -- use domestic topic to present the owner/user's life in the architecture. But my drawing here contains objects of different scale, time zone and direction...... which should be the architectural concept that my project is about.

3rd week (3) -- 500 words project outline

Déjà vu

A definition proposed by Neppe (1983b, 1983e) has become the standard in research on déjà vu:” any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of a present experience with an undefined past” (Neppe, 1983e, p.3) 1

Déjà vu is an individual mental experience that based on one’s past life. Therefore it’s hard (almost impossible) to let two persons to experience the same déjà vu, not to mention sympathetic response for the majority. And déjà vu just happens occasionally to some people. Yet it is the uniqueness and rareness that makes déjà vu an interesting potential project to begin with.

My déjà vu project focuses on “how people experience déjà vu” together with the digging of how people’s past activities store in the mind and affect people’s way of viewing the objective surroundings, and the differences/changes between the objective (the original) and the subjective (the facsimile/interpretation).

As to architectural aspect, the sense of familiarity is, for most of the time, what architects will try to deliver when designing. One might be designing a house for a client who has never been to Athens but fascinated about Greek myths, a space that the client can feel the breeze of Mediterranean. The architectural style is not in my project’s realm, you don’t have to use white and blue to present Greece, maybe a basin of sea salt will have the same effect.

The sense of familiarity of a space may come when the viewer senses the void with his/her experience which is subjective. We take part of other’s life as ours, and when that scenario really happens on us, we feel like it’s already been experienced (as the power of literature that caused Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first visit to Stanton Harcourt’s manor house already implanted to his recollection 2).

People’s experience affects the way they think, that’s why we have so many different understandings about the same thing. We all have our own version of facsimile with the same origin.

The project is to present two persons’ facsimiles about the “same” manor house, Nathaniel Hawthorne (the author with déjà vu experience) and Alexander Pope (the poet that influence Nathaniel’s version of manor house through his perspective). The aim is to discuss the how people’s recognition reads spatial information, or how spatial message is translated by simulacrum that stored in people’s mind.

The method of working (things to do):
1. understand the psychological findings about déjà vu
2. stories and works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Alexander Pope
3. study simulacrum in philosophy, literature, film, art, etc.
4. vermeer’s camera

TACTICS ? :

A: Drawings:
1. First: the “objective” version of manor house
2. Second: the manor house with Alexander Pope’s motion/activity/involvement. (drawings)
3. Third: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s representation of the manor house when he read the poem. (drawings)
4. The simulacrum of the manor house (his grandma’s kitchen) when Nathaniel visited it in person. (drawings)
…….

B: A device that project the image of viewer’s past view onto a mirror/mist, like mirage? A space that projects another space. What you see is what you think it is.

REFERENCES:

1. Alan S. Brown. The déjà vu experience
2. "And I Feel Like I've Been Here Before" (http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/10/and-i-feel-like-ive-been-here-before.cfm)
3. Bryan Jay Wolf. Vermeer and the invention of seeing
4. Robin Evans. The projective cast
5. CJ Lim. Devices
6. Jose Roca. Phantasmagoria……

3rd week (2)-- Device

The device tries to present the concept of Deja vu.

In the middle hangs a spinning angle mirror/reflected metal panel that attracts the viewer and reflect the room with abnormal perspective.

On the top conners of the metal panel installs two cameras that capture every thing happening in the room.

The two projectors project the video that those cameras recorded a while ago. As the viewer first enter the room, looking into the mirror, seeing himself/herself being in the previous scence already--Deja vu?

3rd week (1)-- simulacrum & facsimile

copy of another copy of the original

The left-hand side image tries to outline the imaginary movements of Alexander Pope.

The right-hand side image shows the FACSIMILE that one of the possible explanation of how Deja vu produces. That is, people remeber the item information and the source tag separately. Deja vu might happen when the source tag is forgotten and "tag" with one's own label.

Is it possible to creat a machine that seperate the source tag with the item information, and then tag with new label? (Now I think it's not a good idea, because it's just the demonstration of how mind works, not an architectural project)

Recognition

This BOX intends to let people see inside it, where the mirror paper will reflect the image and creat/project space after space, space within a space......

References

The second - third was searching for more references to find interesting thing to start with.

These are:

1. C h r i s t o p h e r T. R a y

("Elephant Box", "Prisoner")

2. Lacan

3. Max Ernst