Asymmetries (2018-2020)

This site functions as documentation for the installation project on cinema and the city titled Asymmetries (2018-2020). The installation and its various iterations are conceived as a making-thinking-spectatorial research project on the urban premised on strategies developed through modes of artistic research.

I consider the ways in which multiple expressions and interpretations of cities of the global south can best be understood when processes at the fringes are articulated through creative/artistic practices. Often these expressions are in languages or forms that seek to challenge dominant or pre-determined forms and give rise to modalities that are determined from within the (artistic) communities that occupy fringe spaces.

The project considers forms of contemporary film practice in order to explore and re-imagine city life beyond the confines of teleological conceptions.

In particular, the research and its iterative explorations relate to cinema aesthetics and its political confrontation with the mono-focal conception of cinema and its projection norms.

Iterations: Prompts and Projections, Store in Cool Dry Place, Architectonics of the Urban Challenge and Cinema is Wasted on Cinema. (see a dropdown menu of this page)

Asymmetries Installation Lecture at the ARA Conference 22-24 Jan 2020

In this recent iteration, the work was presented as a performative lecture in which the spectators become the actors banished behind the proscenium stage curtain, while I presented the lecture to an ‘empty’ auditorium.

Photos Credit: Zivanai Matangi

https://www.wits.ac.za/ara-conference/

Process

I held on to the idea of balance through the Phi φ symbol in the first conceptual sketches and with my scale ruler in hand, I confronted the 1.618 golden ratio measurement as a starting point. The conceit of the golden ratio in mathematical terms arises from dividing the line segment so that the ratio of the whole segment to the larger piece is equal to the ratio of the larger piece to the smaller piece - a division in extreme and mean ratio. This ratio has been appropriated in western art history, architecture and literature, as a measurement of perfectly, realised beauty and symmetry.

With these measurements in mind, I started drawing and modelling a series of golden rectangles which references the dimension of the monofocal cinema screen and is very close to the 16: 9 aspect ratio that is the international standard for television and computer monitors. In order to complicate the two-dimensional nature of the golden rectangle, I started folding a piece of the rectangular paper in different geometric forms and ultimately ended up with the skeleton of the icosahedron.

As a polyhedron with 20 surfaces, the icosahedral form presents an opportunity to experiment with multiple screens, which can be projected from multiple focal points. The first tests for projection on icosahedron resulted not only in multiplying the surfaces of the images, but there was also an exciting play of planes on what happened as the images were refracted at the dihedral points of the icosahedron skeleton. The subtle movement of the suspended mobile seemed to be editing the images as they started to merge with images projected from various focal points. Steyerl (2012:27) argues that when we start to think through multiple screens, we can disrupt the prescribed focal points of dominant cinema, and can create a new and exciting spatial vision of multiscreen projections, which creates a dynamic viewing space, dispersing perspective and possible points of view. The viewer is no longer unified by such a gaze but is somewhat dissociated and overwhelmed, drafted into the production of content.

The icosahedral multi-screens presented the possibility to instantiate Steyer’s (2012) provocation, but also take it forward and wonder what happens if the screens are not stationary. What if I designed the icosahedral multiple screens in the form of mobile structures suspended in space? What would happen to the furtive images/imprints when projected on a moving target?