Urban Islands: The Review Day

July 27, 20091 Comment Tagged: architecture, cockatoo island, discussion, forum, installations, Urban Islands, urbanislands

Last Saturday was the review day for Urban Islands 2009 - both the culmination and then end point of the two week workshop. All the students and instructors, along with a large number if distinguished guests, headed out to the island to view, critique and discuss the finished projects.

The first studio to present was Geoff's and everyone was led into the dog-leg tunnel where the student's "tarot" cards had been strung up and displayed. The students then each had a short amount of time to present their project, and the item of evidence or paraphenalia they had produced to support it. The ideas were wide and varied, and the finished peices included fictional Playstation games, a Cockatoo Island board game, a light brewery and a snow globe from Cockatoo Island Space Center.

The floor was opened for discussion amongst the students, instructors and guests, and predominantly focused on the economics of the items that had been produced, being that most of them were imagined as commercial items.

Following the discussion, we moved further down the tunnel to the first of Mette's studio's installations. At the dog-leg of the tunnel the installation ran in one corner, a grey-silver organza fabric seeming to grow and flow organically into the dog-leg. Slightly motorised, it shook and shivered a little, breaking up the light and disorienting. The intention was for it be reminiscent of fog, ethereal and vaporous, at once solid and enclosing, but at the same time not there at all.

Continuing along the tunnel and walking along to the rooms near the large turbine room, we came across the other textile-based installations. Largish crowds of people gathered around the installations, wandering around and checking them out from different viewpoints. In the first room was an installation of silk, cut into strange patterns and strung up with wire to different points around the room. As we stood and watched the wires would be pulled, and the structure would gradually fall apart, shifting, tensing and releasing where it ripped.

The next room contained  an artificial weather system strung from the roof. Bottles slowly released water onto a grid of string, pulleys and weights, distributing water in a somewhat random fashion, dependant on the changing weight of the bottles, and other factors.

The final of Mette's studio's installations was in the next room - an array of white upholstery thread - laced from ground level up almost to the roof of the room. Its base was a piece of curved perspex, resulting in the threads all traveling along unique arcs and creating beautiful patterns. The nature of the the thread was such that it picked up and reflected the light around it, which made for quite an interesting effect.

As a loosely-knit group we continued out on the Islands main apron where Mark's Studio's installments were set up. All the pieces were connected together physically in some way and sprawled over quite a large distance. There were concrete blobs set around the apron with cord running between them in some kind of indistinguishable grid. At each of these point there were also small tripods set up with fins painted in different patterns coming out of the top.

Later in the day we would climb to a viewing platform above the apron. From that perspective you could see that in fact the grid of cord made up a perspective wireframe of one of the buildings on the island. The wind had played its part and curved and distorted the lines, but it was still clear that this was an almost life-size (75% scale apparently) representation of an actual building.

There were some large bamboo poles set up with fishing wire running between them in a pattern. As it turned out the wires mapped out a scale model of the topography of one of the Island's dry-docks. Along the pieces of string was reflective tape, that was visible, but unnoticeable. When a photo was taken with the flash, however, and the pieces light up, even in daylight.

Scattered on a the apron were a few items known as "the draw". These were viewing devices set up on stands that changed the way you saw Sydney and the Island itself when you looked through them. One inserted a fictional building on the horizon in North Sydney when you looked through it, and another actually showed you (by way of mirrors) the view perpendicularly to your right, instead of straight ahead in the direction you were looking.

After some time looking at the installations we headed up to the top of the Island where a delicious lunch was provided, and we were given opportunity to sit for a while, feed ourselves and have a bit of a chat. The seagulls on the Island certainly seemed to enjoy the possibility of the food, and were making themselves at home grabbing food off people's plates when left unattended for any period of time.

After lunch we made our way to one of the convict cells (which was equipped with a projector and screen) for the presentations from Mark and Mette's groups. After a few technical hiccups with power cords, adaptors and projectors not working, the guest architects/artists were seated, and the groups started to present. Once the groups had presented, there was a time of discussion with some very interesting ideas presented, ranging over all sorts of topics.

There was talk about the gap between the student's vision for the projects and how much of that finally been achieved (given time constraints and other issues). Each of the groups had intentions beyond the final installation, but had run into problems ranging from accessibility issues to technical aspects not working as desired, even the fact that people hadn't interacted with the works quite as expected. Some of the students mentioned how nice it was to actually be putting their concepts into action, and having to deal with the necessary changes when things didn't work was a valuable part of the experience.

Other students expressed their pleasure at working on installations that were full scale instead of smaller scale models (such as they would normally work on). Some of the guests mentioned that they were glad to see students moving beyond working on computer or paper, and using sewing machines, casting concrete and building things.

There was a little bit of discussion about how many of the pieces had almost an art-like quality to them. The spaces on the island had such a gorgeous aesthetic quality that the installations were treated by those viewing them as pieces of art - to be viewed from a distance. Some of the students had anticipated a more tactile interaction between people and the pieces.

The issue was also mentioned of whether or not there had been consideration made to the installations reacting to the presence of people. As it turned out, one of the groups had been planning on having their installation pulse and move when it came in touch with human skin (by using conductive fibre) but didn't have time in the 2 weeks to perfect it. There was some further discussion on the importance (both for and against) of installations reacting to a human presence.

In relation to Mark's studio there was a lot of talk about the nature of architecture that isn't about building things. The installations were architectural in that they were informed and inspired by the site, but were more of an interpretation and presentation of the island in new ways. They were a tool to inform, to educate and to start discussion. There was a lot of support for this idea that architecture is more than buildings.

There was much more discussed, and i'm sure that each train of discussion could have held it's own for much longer periods of time than we were able to allow. Soon it was time to wrap up. The students dismantled the installations, the bbq was fired up and the beers were opened. It seems that for the organisers, students and instructors the 2 weeks of stress, sleep deprivation and creative thinking had been time well spent.

------------

There's lots more photos from the day over on flickr...