Zagreb publication launch, IfREX
The following day (16 April) the students met to launch, celebrate and discuss a recent publication resulting from a fieldtrip to Zagreb in the first semester. The publication, a collection of posters were not quite what I had expected but meant for a number of ways of creating your own publication, without being restricted by page numbers or a particular order. Not everyone had contributed something for the posters as it was optional and students had joined since the trip (IfREX is now in its third semester) but everyone was keen to have a look through and after a short introduction, the room quietened as people explored the posters.
When we came together again to discuss the posters, Eric and some of the students more directly involved in the production talked about how and why they had made various decisions about the final output. Falling somewhere between documentation and an artwork in itself, the posters were both flexible and specific, and searched for a way of being individual within a group. The students were initially quiet – it was a Friday afternoon – but fairly soon became rather animated. Not all were happy with the posters and there were complaints about how fragile they were and the folds down the middle. This was countered by those who argued that the fold allowed for the posters to be put together in different ways, like pages, and that there were all manner of playful possibilities. The ephemeral quality of the posters seemed to mirror the shortness of the trip to Zagreb. For me, it was an engagement with evocation rather than representation.
Later on, after a short coffee break, Eric presented a lecture which looked at space and perception through Japanese gardens which the group had visited at the end of the second semester during a trip to Japan. Beginning with an interest in phenomenal narratives, Eric explored the sakuteiki (Japanese records of garden-making) and the spatial and perceptual dimensions of particular techniques (such as borrowed landscape, miniaturization, altered perspective, folding screen, and hide and reveal). Although there was a tendency to focus on the visual and on cognitive science, there was much of interest in this talk which was not afraid to digress. It even ended with a reading from Beckett’s Molloy!
This post is tagged co-fabrication, IfREX, materials, writing