Thomas Wiesner

Associate Professor, Architect MAA, School of Architecture, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark

Pataphysics and Serendipity: Almost daily moves in space, recorded

The presentation features an ongoing artistic research project, investigating the use of short videos in common web 2.0 blog/vlog environment(s) and the work’s characteristic repercussions in oblique spatial cognition and creative re-viewing. Started as an experimental project, under the web moniker of Sam Renseiw, the “Spacetwo-Patalab” vlog site has, since August 2005, posted over 598 videos.

Featuring recorded and edited footage manufactured via commonly available digital equipment, the videos primarily explore quotidian moves in space(s), with a particular emphasis on basic architectural matters and bodily moves, with focus on the implications of interior and exterior environments.

The project’s serendipitous, diary like approach, is counter-balanced and supplemented by a ‘pataphysical connotation. Interpreting Alfred Jarry’s definition of pataphysics as “ The science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”, the videos all encompass edited moments of daily whereabouts, resulting in apparently absurd re-visions of normality; While establishing a reflective, experimental cognitive territory of visual exploration, the video works, and the accompanying contextual text posts, offer an oblique, differently focused, artistic glance to the potential re-interpretation of the ubiquitous presence – and taxonomic nature – of on-line videos.

The main interest in my ongoing works might be characterized by a keen attention to inconspicuous, quotidian matters and their seemingly underrated evaluations in both art and especially architectural circles. I treasure the oblique and the often absurd in so called normative situations that I try to bring forth in my works. To paraphrase the French writer Georges Perec: I attempt to exhaust both place and the events within, with a clinical yet subjective, inquisitive gaze. Questioning qualities.