ThinkArchitecture

Cruisescapes

Art In The Anchorage 2002 - N.Y.C.
proposal

Bringing the ideas of in-between space and performativity together with the implosion of material and virtual landscapes, public and private space in contemporary culture, ThinkArchitecture is currently developing a range of labyrinthine environments that respond to an expanded desire for a situationist sensibility for valuing qualities of ambience perceived in the existing cityscape.

Designing a contemporary maze for Kielder Castle (UK), we were re-thinking the labyrinth as a series of centralities - a labyrinthine structure that has no centre because it is only centre. Through the project 'Friendly Versilia' we were re-thinking the labyrinth as a materialisation of desire surrounding and re-writing disavowed, hidden and marginalised public space.

In 'Cruisescape' - our proposal for Art in the Anchorage 2002 - the labyrinth becomes the inner anatomy of desire turned into a material body: Social space in 'Cruisescape' departs from being limited to passively containing action within the confines of a certain programme to an active body that can be flexibly occupied and inhabited according to changing performative acts.

The provisional, phantasmatic and virtual character of social space becoming more significant if we think of resultant material and social organisation in our cities as itself only contributing to the experience of lived space. In this sense the proposed labyrinth plays with the ambivalent and contradictory spatial qualities of temporary, abandoned and marginalised spaces embedded in the urban fabric. In doing so, it suggests a permeability between these spaces and social practices in digital culture. It thinks along the ways in which virtual spaces formed in group action can be analysed as an epistemic enquiry that makes trivialised urban practices and discourses permeable for the conditions of spatial experiences present in virtual digital environments today: browsing, chatting, cruising.

In this inversion of roles material space is turned into the visual surface of a new material structure which corresponds more directly and physically with the psychogeographical qualities of cruising. While material space becomes surface, imaginary space ceases to be a void. It becomes a walk-through body whose ambience can be sensually experienced and performed. At the same time, this proposed structure can be considered with reference to Freud's theory of the uncanny: Cruising the built space, it becomes an uncanny body - something that triggers a sense of estrangement and unhomeliness, yet yields all the qualities intrinsic to the performed practice.