EXHIBITIONS / VAGUE TERRAINS @ EXPANDED ARCHITECTURE

2011

MNP Project statement: Carriageworks, as a reclaimed industrial ‘terrain vague’, is clearly an important and prominent new ‘cultural’ precinct in the Sydney region. While distinct within its immediate geographical context, sites like Carriageworks nonetheless exists as part of an increasingly growing global network of reclaimed post-industrial heritage developments. Clearly the shared industrial tectonic language and the programmatic similarities these sites are put to directly threaten to remove the capacity of these sites to promote themselves as unique urban and cultural spaces. The aim of the work is to see beyond these superficial similarities and reveal the experiential similarities and differences in the expanded field of this growing cultural precinct typology. The project uses CCTV viewing technologies as a mechanism to extract, combine and reconfigure webcam footage from Carriageworks with video sourced from other projects within this ‘heritage’ typology. By manipulating this visual data one loses the distracting visual specificity of the image in order to release the experiential and spatial conditions that underpin this typology. The purpose here is not to make any claims for similarity or difference; rather the expectation is to use the digital reconfiguration of this visual data to reveal the experiential and spatial fingerprints of each of the sampled spaces. In foregrounding the perceptual aspects of these spaces the film allows the audience to consciously or unconsciously respond to this other type of visual information. MNP Projects is the interdisciplinary team of Linda Matthews, Sarah Nolan and Gavin Perin. Linda and Gavin are architects and Sarah is an artist.

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