Sabrina Cufer

Concept Statement

Assessment 3 Possible Futures concept statement

Assessment 3 Final

Cofa 1002

“How can the current disquiet of our time be properly grasped, made comprehensible, examined, and articulated?”

In our final stages, it is always important to look back on the criteria. Assessing our artwork in relation to this question, I consider it to represent an answer to this question. Our work of the non-place and the unending history of the present provokes thought about what the future is and that it can be stripped of it’s sci-fi fantasies. The future doesn’t necessarily relate to technology, but relates to all global social-political circumstances. The future can be applied specifically to the social, the political, the environmental, the economical. But how do we grasp a perception of “All the Worlds Futures”. It is easy to predict a utopian or dystopian picture of the future, as it is so unknown that this realm is easily manipulated by creativity and possibility. We don’t need vivid fantastical or dismal and bleak notions of the future. When this happens we neglect to reflect on the present. We have taken away the dream like stigma of the future and presented the reality. That we may not progress or digress. We may just stay the same for eternity, the world becoming a template to carry on the same movement and passing of time.

Researching into our assessment we have found inspiration and many concepts from Marc Aug, Non places has helped us to establish our key concepts and foundations for thought.

Non-Place by Marc Auge

‘If place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which can not be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.’

With the finalisation of our PDF is occurring, I wanted to revisit our original inspiration. I wanted to delve deeper into the other sources that are in the book, and the different perspectives involving the emergence of the supermodern ‘non-places’. Michel del Certeau is a french scholar, focusing on psychoanalysis, philosophy and social sciences. He states that a ‘place’ to him is a ‘frequented place’, ‘an intersection of moving bodies’. Another scholar Merleau-Ponty describes the distinction between ‘geometric space’ and ‘existential’ space, a space that exists due to experience of relations. He says thats the space is “modified by the transformations resulting from successive influences”. This is evident in our work as we are exploring the notion that the future doesn’t exist without the past. Therfore, a non-place without human interaction is a wasteland. Auge describes space as a “distance between two things or points or to temporal expanse… it is thus eminently abstract”. The non-place has two complementary but distinct realitites: space formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure) and the relations individuals have with these spaces.

“The link between individuals and their surroundings in the space of non-place is established through the mediation of words, or even texts”

Augue describes that we can be taken to non-places due to the written word such as reading about a foreign place and feeling present in that location. This may be a point we make in the way that we use text in our artwork. He says that “It is as if certain texts had become obsolete for the contemporary passenger”. For our highly visual modern audience, we want to make a PDF where the visuals speak for themselves.

“Since non-places are there to be passed through, they are measured in units of time”

We were talking about how to incorporate time into our work, as we need to include periods of time, not history. We were discussing the idea of incorporating vague dates on the buildings. I am now starting the think that we should include not historical dates but times. If we include a time with no date, what is the significance? We use time and clocks to keep track of our lives but what happens if we use time as a frame not a specificity. If non spaces are defined by movement, we could make a fictional amount of time that a person has spent in each building, therefore it is a non-place defined by time and movement, not history.

“An inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the present”

This term is what stands out the most to me. An unending history in the present is a complex concept that is hard to wrap your head around. There is indeed history in the present. Last second is history the next is the future which then becomes history the next second. The passing of time in the present is a concept not usually talked about in regards to the future. As our concept is that the future is neither looking back or forward, I think Auge’s description of the unending history is vital to our art work.

Experiment

Inspired by Prada Marfa, I made a experiment of a icon of consumerism and capitalism with the natural landscape of the desert. This is an appropriation, changing the business to McDonald’s gains a broader reach, as all classes and countries know the icon of Mcdonald’s (I’m assuming more than Prada). More people are likely to know what a big mac is rather than a pair of Prada loafers as high luxury brands cater to a niche market. The idea of the non-place I have found is very effective in creating not only interesting visuals but of provoking thought, as the familiar is being remixed and de-contextualised, causing a sort of confusion and loss of mass preconceived perspective.

Prada Marfa

Prada Marfa is a permanently installed sculpture by artists Elmgreen and Dragset, situated 1.4 miles (2.3 km) northwest of Valentine, Texas and about 26 miles (42 km) northwest of the city of Marfa. The installation was inaugurated on October 1, 2005. The artists called the work a “pop architectural land art project.” This artwork explores the notion of the ‘non-place’ and decontextualisation.

jestyrrell-adad2016

For the no-time no-place group - his process is relevant rather than the conceptual discussion of the monochrome… @mezunsw @sabrinacufercofa1002 @stephengoestocofa @royoutred

#cofa1002

Experimental photos for final assignment

- photos that show structure not time and all represent line and form of buildings

examples of Non Places

Andreas gursky

Week 12 studio exercise Teaching anther how to sew

#cofa1002

Experiment 3

Symmetry and structure

Capturing line and structure through buildings and there formation

Newcomers to older neighborhoods are usually perceived as destructive, tearing down everything that made the place special and attractive. But as A Neighborhood That Never Changes demonstrates, many gentrifiers seek to preserve the authentic local flavor of their new homes, rather than ruthlessly remake them. Drawing on ethnographic research in four distinct communities—the Chicago neighborhoods of Andersonville and Argyle and the New England towns of Provincetown and Dresden—Japonica Brown-Saracino paints a colorful portrait of how residents new and old, from wealthy gay homeowners to Portuguese fishermen, think about gentrification. The new breed of gentrifiers, Brown-Saracino finds, exhibits an acute self-consciousness about their role in the process and works to minimize gentrification’s risks for certain longtime residents. In an era of rapid change, they cherish the unique and fragile, whether a dilapidated house, a two-hundred-year-old landscape, or the presence of people deeply rooted in the place they live. Contesting many long-standing assumptions about gentrification, Brown-Saracino’s absorbing study reveals the unexpected ways beliefs about authenticity, place, and change play out in the social, political, and economic lives of very different neighborhoods.

A Neighbourhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of philosophy has presented a new theory of time. Dr Bradford Skow says the idea that time flows like a river (stock image shown) is not necessarily correct.

Humans are tuned to seek patterns. As the world appears largely disorganized, this entails a whole lot of false positives (apophenia). Sometimes what we perceive as a significant change is really not so significant, and vice versa. Or a series of groundbreaking events can cycle back to a state eerily reminiscent of their beginning. "The more things change, the more things stay the same" is a kind of resignation that the lust of dynamism and progress can be similar to the effect of simply imagining the potentials imbued in things that do not appear to be changing at all. Change and constant are two sides of the same coin, one we are rarely taught to see as whole. One without the other should feel like the sound of one hand clapping.

Turbulent changes do not affect reality on a deeper level other than to cement the status quo.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_more_things_change,_the_more_they_stay_the_same (via sabrinacufercofa1002)

"Do you believe in Time?","Does Time exist?", "What IS Time?", "Is Time-Travel possible?" Many people may casually ask questions like these, and expect sensible answers to some degree. But there may be a problem. for these are 'leading question'. Each one based on the already existing assumption that there is, or may be a thing called "Time". If this assumption is in fact wrong, and this is not noticed, then one may be setting off down an endless path with very little chance of rechecking ones fundamental error. This site is about exploring the possibility that becasue all we seem to see is a constant set of matter just existing and interacting, and we don't seem to see anything "coming out of a future" or, "disappearing into a past", then may be logically and scientifically wrong from the outset to even suspect a past, a future, and thus a thing called time exist. Instead the universe may be just as it appears to be. Filled with a moving and changing set of matter, misleading us in to thinking there "is" a past, if we over-interpret some of the contents of our minds by, "calling" them "memories of the past", and, unscientifically, taking this as proof there really is a "temporal past", and thus time. M.Marsden.