How long is the Yellow Brick Road
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This work started by asking the question: ‘How long is the Yellow Brick Road? Growing up and still today, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum) is one of my favourite fairy tales, but how do you measure a space that does not have a physical landscape? Using drawing as measurement I mapped the text using human and animal interactions, sounds, textures and meals as units of space. Space was also mapped by human drawings – simulations using different scenarios paralleling Dorothy and her friend’s journey to the Emerald City. The drawing is a virtual and physical construction of space, delineated by charts, graphs, text and a literary spreadsheet map, of Dorothy’s and my own measurements of the Yellow Brick Road.
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The Production of Space (by Henri Lefebvre) is reviewed as one of the most important philosophy texts of the 20th century and was part of my required University reading, but I just don’t get it. The text is complex and eclectic with looping, rambling metaphors and contradictions. Reading to keep up with these multiple ideas and style only to be looped back to where I started, the book continually turns me inside out. What kind of space is The Production of Space? Researching the author, Lefebvre and finding his love of music, I decided to investigate his writing as a form of a fugue focusing on the interweaving repetitive writing and looping style elements. Using drawing to measure the physical aspects of the book (i.e. the frequency of index entries, locations of words on pages to physical locations, rhythms and looping structures); I ‘produced’ notational drawings in the form of a musical spatial score with a computer keyboard (standalone) as the instrument.
Build and Tuck
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Betty stops to read adverts mounted on the scaffolding of a group of buildings undergoing their own technological transformation. As she reads, the scaffolding begins to surround and transform her. With the availability of ‘ready made implants’ existing boundaries are changing. What happens when the boundary between Betty, technology and our environment disappears altogether?
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The Anatomy of a Crooked Man is about measurement as a mapping system – mapping spaces to numerical objects in the nursery rhyme ‘There was a crooked man’. This work questions the measuring process – how do you measure crooked? For example why is an art exhibition, a hotel, and a restaurant all measured the same 5 star rating?
The Anatomy of a Crooked Man