Still Life
Exhibition Entry for the Greek Pavilion
Venice Architecture Biennale, 2016
Project Team: Tei Carpenter, Debbie Chen, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Rutger Huiberts, Jaffer Kolb, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Parina Vasilopoulou
7 collaborators. Brooklyn, New York.
A sunny Sunday in April, 9:00am - 5:00pm.
Let’s say…the idea is to short-circuit a collaborative design project to produce a simultaneous series of inputs that could avoid the drawbacks of collaboration fraught with red tape, negotiation, and diluted compromise. In an explicitly short time frame of eight hours, to simulate a typical work day, we produce a structure that is based on an urgency of time—more hare than tortoise, but this time the hare wins. Through this real-time experiment which recasts the Google Document as primary design tool, collaboration transforms from a polite exercise in moderation into a spatial avalanche, a narrative baroque that is at once anarchic yet dynamic and unexpectedly consensual. It’s an act of free will, together. We expressly frustrate the design process by evacuating pragmatic concerns of program and efficiency and anxieties surrounding crisis, to recalibrate our approach to design as purely spatial, haptic, perceptual, and qualitative. A polyfocal open work that is ripe for interpretation, mis-reading, and further collusion. This rehearsal for collaboration is bathed in earnest, intuitive, delirious, and semi-hallucinatory participation.
A sunny Sunday in April, 9:00am - 5:00pm.
Let’s say…the idea is to short-circuit a collaborative design project to produce a simultaneous series of inputs that could avoid the drawbacks of collaboration fraught with red tape, negotiation, and diluted compromise. In an explicitly short time frame of eight hours, to simulate a typical work day, we produce a structure that is based on an urgency of time—more hare than tortoise, but this time the hare wins. Through this real-time experiment which recasts the Google Document as primary design tool, collaboration transforms from a polite exercise in moderation into a spatial avalanche, a narrative baroque that is at once anarchic yet dynamic and unexpectedly consensual. It’s an act of free will, together. We expressly frustrate the design process by evacuating pragmatic concerns of program and efficiency and anxieties surrounding crisis, to recalibrate our approach to design as purely spatial, haptic, perceptual, and qualitative. A polyfocal open work that is ripe for interpretation, mis-reading, and further collusion. This rehearsal for collaboration is bathed in earnest, intuitive, delirious, and semi-hallucinatory participation.