PROJECT SYNOPSIS

I started this project  by exploring the link between depiction of space in film in response to protagonist's state of mind. I was interested in the subjective view of spaces as seen by the camera lens. I also looked at the ways we perceive spaces and objects. One interesting concept I came across, Gestalt psychology, explained how a fragmentary view of space is processed by our brains to be understood as a coherent whole. Therefore if we see a fragment of a building behind railing we will know it is one object rather that reading it as a series of elements as seen between the bars. Likewise, as we walk past places and objects, we perceive them as whole entities while in reality we only see fragments and, moreover, their position against us changes every step we take through the space and over time. This, as a space-time relationship brings us back to film where seeing a part of a location, we place it in context to understand it, we assume the continuation of this location off-screen. However, watching surrealist films, especially Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali I noticed that just by blurring the edges of the screen into black, we isolate the space we see and it appears to exist in void, it does not extend off-screen. These notions eventually lead to an idea where I revert the process of turning fragmentary view into a coherent whole and break down a building I pass by into sections as ween by camera lens, frame by frame. I then, using a camera lens, fragment a coherent architectural entity into segments relative to its position in frame, second after second. This relates to Muybridge's photo experiments of horses in motion, however in this instance it is a person that is moving along a building that remains in its place. The proposed depiction of an architectural object becomes an installation showing a space normally perceived (however not actually seen) as a whole entity. It thus represents the changes in what we see as a building over space and time, as we move past it.